This author is generally supposed to have lived about 1270, in the reign of Henry III. or Edward I.[183] Bale places him even much earlier.[184]
Gilbert has a chapter headed “De Lepra.” In this chapter he describes very minutely the four usual modifications of lepra (the Elephantia, Leonina, Tyria, and Alopecia), varieties which, he himself observes, are rarely found pure and simple, but generally mixed together (compositas).[185] To quote in proof of this his long and very detailed account of the disease would occupy much space and only lead to repetition. That the description, however, which Gilbert has drawn of the leprosy of the middle ages is one of the most just and accurate penned during these times, has been often and freely admitted by Sauvages, Sprengel, and other competent judges. Further, that the lepra as described by Gilbert, and as understood by him and his contemporaries in England, meant the elephantiasis of the Greeks, is evident (without going into particulars) from the simple fact, that the sagacious Sauvages refers to and quotes this chapter of Gilbert’s on lepra as one of the best descriptions extant of Greek elephantiasis.[186]
In an official report given in to the Royal Society of Medicine of Paris in 1782, upon the Greek elephantiasis, the reporters, MM. Chamseru and Coquereau, specially allude to Gilbert’s description as the most clear exposition of it to which they could refer.[187] Again, in an analysis of the works of this early English author, the learned Professor Sprengel observes, “Gilbert sometimes relates, though very rarely, observations which are proper to himself, and which deserve to be quoted. In this number I include particularly those concerning leprosy. We may almost look upon them as the first exact description which has been given of that malady by the Christian physicians of the west. The spots which foretell it, and the signs of its first invasion, are at least described by him in a manner agreeable to nature,” etc.[188]
Here, then, we have the direct and positive evidence of an English physician of the thirteenth century, that the term lepra was then used in this country specially to designate the varieties of Greek elephantiasis; and I might adduce (if it were at all necessary), to demonstrate exactly the same circumstance, the chapter which John of Gaddesden, Professor of Medicine in Merton College, Oxford,[189] and Court physician to Edward II., has devoted to lepra or elephantiasis in his famous Rosa Anglica, a work written towards the commencement of the succeeding or fourteenth century.[190] In this “Opus luculentum et eruditum” (as at least Leland terms it),[191] the author describes at considerable length the nature, causes, and premonitory signs, etc., of lepra and its varieties, and enters minutely into the pathognomonic signs (signa demonstrativa infallibilia) of the disease, as respectively taken from the face, from the extremities, from the blood, and from the humours of the body. A quotation from his signs of leprosy, as taken from the face, will at once show that by that term (lepra) he meant the Greek elephantiasis. I shall give the passage in his own words. “A Facie, rotundatio oculorum, contractio palpebrarum, lacrimositas multa et aquositas oculorum, depiliatio superciliorum et grossities eorum; dilatatio narium exterius et constrictio interius, et coartatio anhelitus, quasi si cum naribus loqueretur. Et color faciei lividus vergens ad fuscedinem mortificatam. Terribilis aspectus faciei cum fixo intuitu. Contractio et palpebrarum et aurium. Infectio cutis maculosa. Tuberositas et pustulae in facie et nodositas. Ista omnia et major pars sunt infallibilia signa lepræ actualis.”[192] In a subsequent part of his chapter on Lepra, John of Gaddesden strongly states, that “no one is to be adjudged a leper, and separated from intercourse of mankind (ab hominum conversatione separandus), until the figure and form of the face is actually changed. Hence cancer (gangrene?) in the feet, or foul scabbing, must not be considered as arguing the presence of leprosy, nor nodosities, unless they appear on the face and with the aforesaid conditions.”[193]
The testimony of Bartholomey Glanville, an English author of the latter part of the fourteenth century,[194] may be adduced in support of the same view. In his work “De Proprietatibus Rerum” he describes persons affected with leprosy (lepra) as having “redde Whelkes and Pymples in the Face, out of whome oftenne runne Blood and Matter: in such the Noses swellen, and ben (become) grete, the vertue of Smellynge faylyth, and the Brethe stynkyth ryght fowle.” When, he further observes, the disease is so advanced that the infected are “unclene, spotyd, glemy, and quyttery (ichorous), the Nosethrilles ben stopyl, the Wasen of the Voys is rough, and the Voys is horse, and the Heere [hair] falls.”[195]
In addition to the preceding direct medical evidence, it may not be considered irrelevant to the present question to remark that, in most of the lazar-house charters and notices in England and Scotland that I have had access to, the inmates of these institutions are described by the adjective leprosus, or by some application of the corresponding noun lepra, as “lepra percussi,” “infecti lepra.” I have, however, met with one very striking exception to this general rule, and I allude to it here as confirmatory of what I have stated with regard to the nature of the disease for which these leper hospitals were instituted in our own country. The leper hospital of Sherburne was, as I have already had occasion to mention, endowed for sixty patients, and was hence one of the largest in England. It was founded in 1181 by Hugh Pudsey, “the jollie Bishope of Durham.” In a MS. History of the Durham Cathedral and Diocese, in the Bodleian Library,[196] the inmates of the Sherburne Hospital, instead of being termed Leprosi, are directly designated Elephantuosi. In speaking of the acts of Bishop Pudsey, the MS. states, amongst other things, that he constructed the hospital of Sherburne, and planted in it lepers collected from all parts of the bishoprick. (Elefantuosos, in Episcopatu suo circumquaque collectos, ibidem instituit.)
Nature of the Leprosy of Scotland.
I have hitherto said nothing to show that the disease in Scotland was of the nature of Greek elephantiasis. During the earlier ages at which it prevailed in this country, medicine was little cultivated, and we have no professional work of any kind left us by the Scottish physicians of that period, from which to derive any evidence on this subject.[197]
Amidst this dearth, however, of medical writings during the middle ages in Scotland, it gives me pleasure to refer to a passage in one of our earliest Scotch poets, affording proof that the leprosy of this country was, as on the continent, truly the Greek elephantiasis.
It is well known to the lovers of early Scotch literature that Henryson, a schoolmaster of Dunfermline, who wrote before the year 1500, composed, among other things, The Testament of Cresseid as a sequel to the Troilus and Cresseid of his immediate predecessor Chaucer.[198] Indulging, like his English prototype, in the wildest forms of anachronism, the Scottish poet confessedly subjects, in almost every particular, the ancient and foreign characters of the piece to the manners, incidents, and institutions of his own times, and of his own country. In this spirit he afflicts, at last, the fickle and unfortunate Cresseid with leprosy, as perhaps the most appalling of dooms to which he could consign her. The poet afterwards sends her “unto yone hospitall at the tounis’ end.” The particular symptoms which he makes Saturn invoke upon Cresseid, to transform her into a leper, are exactly the most marked symptoms of Greek elephantiasis: