Leprosy in modern history

Leprosy is also known as Hansen’s disease or neurodermatitis and is caused by a rod-shaped bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, that is spread in droplets of nasal mucus.

According to historical and archeological evidence leprosy was first spread to the Middle East in the days of Alexander the Great, during the years 324-325 BC, and was not known before.

The Greek word lepra was most likely used to mean a variety of severe skin diseases. Greek medical writings later than the third century BC provide the earliest clinical references to modern leprosy.

In medieval Europe, leprosy patients had to carry a ‘clapper’ to warn others that a person with leprosy was approaching. Even as late as 1913, state Senator G.E Willet of Montana was forced to give up his seat after he was diagnosed with leprosy.

In the 1870s, Armauer Hansen discovered microbe that causes the affliction and treatments were eventually developed. A prominent dermatologist in Norway, Daniel Cornelius Danielsen, wrote the first extensive description of leop0rsy, it was this description that Hansen used 20 year later as the basis for his studies of leprosy.

In the 1980s, a set of drugs was discovered that together can stop the progress of the disease. Today, 75% of all cases of leprosy occur in South East Asia, primarily in India.
Leprosy in modern history

Leprosy in ancient times

Most medical historians believe that leprosy originated in Egypt, and the leprosy bacillus called mycobacterium leprae has been found in at least one mummy that also showed the typical scaly evidence of the disease on its skin.

It probably first moved eastward to India and China and the Pacific and then northwestward to Europe. Leprosy was introduced to the Western Hemisphere by European settlers.

It has been believed until the 1970s that leprosy is an old disease recorded in most ancient civilizations, including Egypt, India, China and Mesopotamia.

The Hebrews fleeing Egypt during the Exodus almost certainly had been contaminated.

In 62 BC, after fighting in Egypt, Roman soldiers returned to Pompeii spreading leprosy to Italy.

In the mid 1970s archeological findings in China findings revealed a legal document considered to have been compiled between the 4th century and 217 BC describing an illness called li manifesting symptoms suggestive of leprosy.

Leprosy was for a long time associated with disease known in the Judeo-Christian world as sara’at, mentioned in the famous chapter of Leviticus, the very source of stigmatization of leprosy in the Christian West for more than a thousand years.

One cuneiform text from ancient Mesopotamia, which mentions the destruction of fingers and toes, sounds like a destruction of leprosy. They also mention of white patches or nodules on the body, possibly a distinction between tuberculoid and lepromatous leprosy, the two principle forms of the disease.

Leprosy peaked in the West during the middle Ages. The pilgrims and advancing troops of the Crusades, from AD 1095 to 1272, spread the disease thought Europe and the Middle East.

Before the advent do chemotherapy, leprosy was treated with the application of tropical agents or injections to skin lesions. The discovery of sulfonamides paved the way for use of antibiotic chemotherapy to treat leprosy.
Leprosy in ancient times