Chapter II

LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN.

The history of leprosy in Britain can hardly be the history of leprosy alone, but of that disease along with others which were either mistaken for it or conveniently and euphemistically included under it. That there was leprosy in the country is undoubted; but it is just as certain that there was lues venerea; that the latter as a primary lesion led an anonymous existence or was called lepra or morphaea if it were called anything; that the remote effects of the lues were not known as such, being taken for detached or original outcomes of the disordered humours and therefore in the same general class as leprous manifestations; and that the popular and clerical notions of leprosy were too superstitious and inexact, even if the diagnostic intention had been more resolute than it was, to permit of any clear separation of the leprous from the syphilitic, to say nothing of their separation from the poor victims of lupus and cancer of the face, of scrofulous running sores, or of neglected skin-eruptions more repulsive to the eye than serious in their nature. I shall give some proof of each of those assertions—as an essential preliminary to any correct handling of the historical records of British leprosy.