[192] Rosa Anglica quatuor Libris distincta (Papiae, 1492), lib. ii. cap. vii. p. 55; or Joannis Anglici Praxis Medica, Rosa Anglica dicta (Schopf’s edit. 1595), p. 1076, sqq.
[193] Rosa Anglica, p. 1079. The editor, Schopf, appends to this passage a rubric, stating the above sound counsel as “Decretum Joannis Angli de Leprosis.”
[194] Pitt places him about 1360: Eloy, vol. ii. p. 354; Freind, vol. ii. p. 293.
[195] From the old translation of Glanville’s work, De Proprietatibus Rerum, by John Trevisa, Vicar of Barkley. See Phil. Trans. vol. xxxi. p. 59.
[196] Eccles. Dunelm. Hist. l. liii. f. 56, a; vide Monasticon Anglicanum, tom, ii. p. 437, a.
[197] Bernhard Gordon of Montpellier, whose description of the disease I have already quoted, has been sometimes alleged to be a native of Scotland, see Sprengel’s Histoire, ii. p. 447; but without any other evidence whatever than that derivable from his Scottish surname.
[198] The Testament of Cresseid, compylit be M. Robert Henrysone, Sculemaister in Dunfermeling. Imprentit at Edinburgh, 1593. Reprinted by the Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1824. The poem has been published, without the name of the author, in Godfray’s and most other later editions of Chaucer’s Works.
[199] This complication was not so common as to be regarded as a constant and pathognomonic sign of Greek elephantiasis, but it is noted as an important and frequent one, by various authors, both ancient and modern. Hally-Abbas tells us, in our diagnosis of a case of the disease, to be particular in examining “album oculorum ne forte turbatum est” (Lib. i. cap. xxiv.); Rhazes attributes great value as a diagnostic mark of his Juddam or elephantiasis to the “conturbatio albedinis oculorum” (Lib. v. cap. cxx.); Avicenna, among his incipient signs, states “et apparet in oculis obfuscatio ad rubedinem declivis” (Lib. iv. Fen. iii. Fr. 3, cap. ii.) Not to multiply examples, I may merely mention that Theodoric, in the thirteenth century, places early among his list of signs “oculorum in albedine lividitas” (Lib. iii. cap. lv.); see also Lanfranc (Doct. i. Tr. iii. c. 7, albedo oculorum obfuscator); Arnald of Villeneuve (Brev. ii. c. 46, multum rubeae); Gilbert (Lib. viii. oculi circulos habent rubros), etc. Dr. Heberden, in his account of the tubercular leprosy in Madeira, states, in regard to a case, “that the confirmed elephantiasis was attended with livid and scirrhous tubercles, which had overspread the face and limbs; the whole body was emaciated; the eyebrows inflated; the hair of the eyebrows fallen off entirely; the bones of the nose depressed; the alae nasi tumefied, as likewise the lobes of the ears; with a suffusion in both eyes, which had almost deprived the patient of sight,” etc.—Medical Transactions of the College of Physicians, vol. i. p. 35.
[200] I give the term “livid” as synonymous with the old Scotch term “haw,” under the idea that it expresses in all probability, as nearly as possible, the meaning of the author. The Scottish writer Gawin Douglas renders the Latin adjectives “caeruleus” and “glaucus,” by the adjective “haw,” in his celebrated translation of “The xiii. bukes of Eneados of the famose poet, Virgill, out of Latyne verses, into Scottish meter.” For the occasional livid colour of the lumps or tubercles in the face, see the extract in the preceding note from Dr. Heberden, and the modern descriptions quoted in a previous page from Bateman and Schedel.
[201] Since writing the above, I have met with the following interesting notice in the still earlier voyage of Martin to St. Kilda, the most westerly island of the Hebrides. Describing his visit to St. Kilda, in 1697, he states, “Some thirteen years ago, the Leprosy broke amongst the inhabitants, and some of their numbers died of it. There are two families at present labouring under the disease. The symptoms of it are, their feet begin to fail; their appetite declining; their faces becoming too red, and breaking out in pimples; a hoarseness, and their hair falling off from their heads; the crown (?) of it exulcerates and blisters; and, lastly, their beards grow thinner than ordinary.”—Voyage to St. Kilda (first published in 1698), p. 40 of edition of 1749.