Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England. Elizabethan people suffer from some afflictions that no
longer exist in modern England. Plague is the obvious example but it is by no means the only one. Sweating sickness kills tens of thousands of people on its first appearance in 1485 and periodically thereafter. It is a terrifying disease because sufferers die within hours. It doesn’t return after a particularly bad outbreak in 1556 but people do not know whether it has gone for good; they still fear it, and it continues to be part of the medical landscape for many years. How does the paragraph develop the central idea that Elizabethans suffered from diseases that are unfamiliar to modern readers? It lists diseases found only in modern England.
I<span>t provides the example of sweating sickness.
This example shows the reader that there was a disease and cause of death in Elizabethan England that does not still exist to our knowledge today. Most people probably had never heard of 'sweating sickness', so when it's presented in the passage it is effective in showing that Elizabethan ailments were different than modern ones. </span>
