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        Have you ever wondered what it would have been like living in the Middle Ages? A time when hunger and illness were frequently inescapable? The medical scene of the early Middle Ages was still reflective of the Greek and Roman eras (Lindberg 317). Many theories of health, disease, diagnostic techniques, and therapeutic procedures from the Greeks and Romans were passed down to medieval practitioners. Unfortunately, especially for the ill, the learned aspect of these practices fell behind. 

         Medieval men and women considered themselves "old" at the age of forty-five (Wear 61). The possible life-span of these people was considered to be the same as ours, but the average life-span was somewhere between thirty and thirty-five years. This number is said to have dropped all the way down to eighteen and twenty years after the introduction of the plague in 1348 (Wear 61). Of course these figures were subject to such factors like poverty versus wealth and living in a city as opposed to the countryside. 

        The low level of personal hygiene also contributed to disease, especially in the cities. As an admitted clean-freak, I cannot imagine living conditions where sewer systems were inadequate, water supplies were tainted with human and animal fecal matter, and soap was expensive if available at all (Wear 62). In summary it is safe to say that the widespread burden of disease made its mark on medieval citizens and more attention began to be paid towards medicine and the healing arts. 

         Now that I have laid out this very brief portrait of medieval medicine I would like to present the topic of leprosy.  Leprosy, like so many other topics in history, was actually accorded much more significance than its actual physical threat it posed to medieval populations (Rawcliffe 17). Because of this I will not spend too much time on this topic, but I just wanted to give a snapshot of what it might have been like as a leper in early medieval Europe.

        Maria magically describes her life as a leper to a college student from our modern day:

  Maria :  Hello Mister Curious

 

  College Student :  Oh hello scary ghost of a medieval leper.  I was wandering, what was your life like?

  

  Maria :    You want to know what my life was like eh?  Well my life was one full of strife.  Some communities required people like me to limit their movement and to carry horns, bells, or clappers to identify themselves (Wear 72).  My community actually passed a law for the expulsion of lepers.  That meant that I was going to be sent to a leprosarium or leper colony.  Unfortunately the theorists of medicine those days knew nothing about contagions.  We were cast out because our societies viewed us as morally corrupt.  We were sent to leprosaria to be secluded from the rest of society and to be provided food and shelter.  These were not what you as a modern day person would consider hospitals, because we were given no medical care.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, we were not allowed admittance to sanctuaries and shrines, so there were very few of us who experienced “miracles” (Wear 73).  No cure had been found in my day, but I heard that in the 1300s (centuries after my death) a physician attributed my condition to something like cancer, not moral corruption or sin.  He apparently said:

“Leprosy is a disease caused by melancholic matter, or by matter that has been converted into melancholia, tainted by an irreversible corruption, which has the same effect upon the entire body as a cancer in a cancerous member.  So, just as the cancer can only be eliminated by gangrene of the entire member in which it is found, in the same way leprosy cannot be cured without the corruption or surgical removal of all the infected body.  Now that is impossible.”

               -Henri de Mondeville (ca. 1320)

    (Rawcliffe 170)