Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland.
Most of the leper-spitals of Scotland would appear to have been of the poorest kind, unendowed and unprovided with priests. The richest foundation for lepers in Scotland was at Kingcase, near Prestwick in Ayrshire, endowed with lands and consisting of a hospital of eight beds. One or more leper-hospitals were built by the rich abbeys on the Tweed (at Aldcambus in Berwickshire and probably at another place). Another great ecclesiastical centre in Scotland, Elgin, had a leper-house at Rothfan, with accommodation for seven lepers, a chaplain, and a servant. After these, the Scots leper-houses may be taken to have been mere refuges, in which the lepers supported themselves by begging. One such secular hospital was in the Gorbals of Glasgow, founded in 1350. Liberton, near Edinburgh, is supposed to mean Leper-town, and to have been a resort of the sick on account of its medicinal spring. The hospital at Greenside, then outside Edinburgh, was built in 1589. There was a leper-spital outside the Gallow-gate of Aberdeen, on a road which still bears the name of the Spital. Similar shelters may be inferred to have existed at Perth, Stirling, Linlithgow and other places. James IV., in his journeys, used to distribute small sums to the sick folk in the “grandgore” (syphilis), to the poor folk, and to the lipper-folk, “at the town end[192].”
There were some leper-hospitals in Ireland, but it is not easy to distinguish them in every case from general hospitals for the sick poor. Thus the hospital built by the monks of Innisfallen in 869 is merely called nosocomium, although it is usually reckoned an early foundation for lepers in Ireland. A hospital at Waterford was “confirmed to the poor” by the Benedictines in 1185. St Stephen’s in Dublin (1344) is specially named as the residence of the “poor lepers of the city” in a deed of gift about 1360-70; a locality of the city called Leper-hill was perhaps the site of another refuge. Lepers also may have been the occupants of the hospitals at Kilbrixy in Westmeath (St Bridget’s), of St Mary Magdalene’s at Wexford (previous to 1408), of the house at “Hospital,” Lismore (1467), at Downpatrick, at Kilclief in county Down, at Cloyne, and of one or more of four old hospitals in or near Cork. The hospital at Galway, built “for the poor of the town” about 1543, was not a leper-house, nor is there reason to take the old hospital at Dungarvan as a foundation specially for lepers[193].