page_title: 1557 influenza pandemic
section_title: Kingdom of France
hierarchical_section_title: 1557 influenza pandemic / Europe / Kingdom of France
caption_attribution_description: Lazare Rivière [Riverius]. Line engraving by C. Brunand. Iconographic Collections Keywords: portrait prints; C. Brunand; Lazare Rivière
context_page_description: In 1557 a pandemic strain of influenza emerged in Asia, then spread to Africa, Europe, and eventually the Americas. This flu was highly infectious and presented with intense, occasionally lethal symptoms. Medical historians like Thomas Short, Lazare Rivière and Charles Creighton gathered descriptions of catarrhal fevers recognized as influenza by modern physicians attacking populations with the greatest intensity between 1557 and 1559. The 1557 flu saw governments, for possibly the first time, inviting physicians to instill bureaucratic organization into epidemic responses. It is also the first pandemic where influenza is pathologically linked to miscarriages, given its first English names, and is reliably recorded as having spread globally. Influenza caused higher burial rates, near-universal infection, and economic turmoil as it returned in repeated waves.
context_section_description: French physician and medical historian Lazare Rivière documented an anonymous physician's descriptions of a flu outbreak occurring in the Languedoc region of France in July 1557. The disease, often called coqueluche by the French, caused a severe outbreak in Nîmes that featured a fast onset of symptoms like headaches, fevers, loss of appetite, fatigue, and intense coughing. Most of those who died from the disease did so on the fourth day, but some succumbed up to 11 days after first symptoms. Across Languedoc influenza had a high mortality rate, with up to 200 people per day dying in Toulouse at the height of the region's epidemic.  Italian physician Francisco Vallerioli, known as François Valleriola, was a witness to the epidemic in France and described the 1557 flu's symptoms as featuring a fever, severe headache, intense coughing, shortness of breath, chills, hoarseness, and expulsion of phlegm after seven to 14 days. French lawyer Étienne Pasquier wrote that the disease began with a severe pain in the head and a 12 to 15 hour fever while sufferers' noses "ran like a fountain." Paris saw its judiciary disrupted when the Paris Law Court suspended its meetings to slow the spread of flu. Medical historian Charles-Jacques Saillant described this influenza as especially fatal to those who were treated with bleeding and very dangerous to children.
caption: Lazare Rivière researched and described the 1557 flu in France
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