CHAPTER V THE LEPER IN ENGLAND
“From the benefactions and possessions charitably bestowed upon the hospital, the hunger, thirst and nakedness of those lepers, and other wants and miseries with which they are incessantly afflicted . . . may be relieved.”
(Foundation Charter of Sherburn.)
WE now turn from leper-asylums to consider the leper himself—a sadly familiar figure to the wayfaring man in the Middle Ages. He wears a sombre gown and cape, tightly closed; a hood conceals his want of hair, which is, however, betrayed by the absence of eyebrows and lashes; his limbs are maimed and stunted so that he can but hobble or crawl; his features are ulcerated and sunken; his staring eyes are unseeing or unsightly; his wasted lips part, and a husky voice entreats help as he “extends supplicating lazar arms with bell and clap-dish.”
At the outset it is necessary to state that inmates of lazar-houses were not all true lepers. Persons termed leprosi, infirmi, elefantuosi, languidi, frères malades, meselles, do not necessarily signify lepers in a strict sense. Gervase of Canterbury, writing about 1200, speaks of St. Oswald’s, Worcester, as intended for “Infirmi, item leprosi”; and these words are used synonymously in Pipe Rolls, charters, seals, etc. “Leprosy” was an elastic term as commonly used. In the statutes of one hospital, p049 the patriarch Job was claimed as a fellow-sufferer—“who was so smitten with the leprosy, that from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head there was no soundness in him.” A lazar was one “full of sores,” and any person having an inveterate and loathsome skin-eruption might be considered infected. Disfiguring and malignant disorders were common. Victims of scrofula, lepra, lupus, tuberculosis, erysipelas (or “St. Anthony’s fire”) and persons who had contracted disease as the baneful result of a life stained with sin, would sometimes take advantage of the provision made for lepers, for in extremity of destitution this questionable benefit was not to be despised. In foreign lands to-day, some are found not unwilling to join the infected for the sake of food and shelter; we are told, for example, that the Hawaiian Government provides so well for lepers that a difficulty arises in preventing healthy people from taking up their abode in the hospitals. On the other hand, it often happens that those who are actually leprous refuse to join a segregation-camp.
No one, however, can deny that leprosy was once exceedingly prevalent, and after weighing all that might be said to the contrary, Sir J. Y. Simpson and Dr. George Newman were convinced that the disease existent in England was for the most part true leprosy (elephantiasis Græcorum).