“The second reason is that when a mesiaus calls on a healthy man, or when a healthy man calls on a mesel, the mesiaus may put in the defense that he is beyond the reach of worldly law, and cannot be held responsible in such a case.”
These unfortunates besides could not inherit nor dispose of their own wealth during their lives. The following passage from the “ancient customs of Normandy” bears witness, i. e.:
“The mesel can be no man’s heir from the time his disease is developed, but he may have a life interest, as though he were not a mesel.”
The same as in many other diseases the leprosy presented itself under different forms and various degrees of gravity, as is proved from the following passage from Le Pelerinage de l’humaine lignee:
“Homs, qui ne scet bien discerner
Entre sante et maladie,
Entre le grant mesellerie
Entre le moienne et le meure.”
This gravity of different forms of leprosy has likewise been mentioned by the Arabian school, and notably by Avicenna, who had seen numerous cases complicated with ulcerations of the genital organs; also, by the Englishman, Gilbert, who wrote in the thirteenth century regarding the existence of several species of leprosy, which could not always be easily distinguished by reason of the uncertainty of their symptoms. As to its character as a constitutional malady we have the word of the Syrian Jaliah ebn Serapion, who attributes its connection to the predominance of certain humors; finally, Valescus of Tarentum insists on the heredity of the disease.
The leprosy, the pork measles and the mesellerie were then only clinical forms of a single affection of a contagious nature—a hereditary disease whose symptoms appeared successively on the skin, in the mucous membranes, the viscera and in the nervous system. It then required a diathesis, which resembled greatly in its evolution that of syphilis, with which it has often been confounded.