LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

"Set firmly in the medical, religious and cultural milieu of the European middle ages, this hook is the first serious academic study of a disease surrounded by misconceptions and prejudices." "Even specialists will be surprised to learn that most stereotypical ideas about the segregation of medieval lepers originated in the nineteenth century; that leprosy excited a vast range of responses, from admiration to revulsion; that in the later middle ages it was diagnosed readily even by laity; that a wide range of treatment was available; that medieval leper hospitals were no more austere than the monasteries on which they were modelled; and that the decline of leprosy was not monocausal but implied a complex web of factors - medical, environmental, social and legal."--Jacket.