A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) by Charles Creighton
CHAPTER II.
450 words | Chapter 17
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.
Leprosy in Medieval Medical Treatises.
The picture given of true leprosy in the medieval treatises on medicine is
unmistakeable. There are two systematic writers about the year 1300 who
have left a better account of it than the Arabian authors from whom they
mostly copied. While the writers in question have transferred whole
chapters unaltered from Avicenna, Rhazes and Theodoric, they have improved
upon their models in the stock chapter ‘De Lepra.’ It so happens that
those two writers, Bernard Gordonio and Gilbertus Anglicus, bear names
which have been taken to indicate British nationality, and the picture of
leprosy by the latter has actually been adduced as a contemporary account
of the disease observed in England[134]. Gordonio was a professor at
Montpellier, and his experience and scholarship are purely foreign. The
circumstances of Gilbert the Englishman are not so well known; but it is
tolerably certain that he was not, as often assumed, the Gilbert Langley,
Gilbert de l’Aigle, or Gilbertus de Aquila, who was physician to Hubert,
archbishop of Canterbury († 13 July, 1205)[135], having been a pupil at
Salerno in the time of Aegidius of Corbeil (about 1180). The treatise of
Gilbertus Anglicus bears internal evidence of a later century and school;
it is distinguished by method and comprehensiveness, and is almost exactly
on the lines of the _Lilium Medicinae_ by Gordonio, whose date at
Montpellier is known with some exactness to have been from 1285 to about
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