Completion of a 115,000-word illustrated monograph titled, """"""""'A Cancer of the Whole Body': Leprosy in Pre-Modern Medicine,"""""""" for publication by Johns Hopkins University Press. The project focuses on a subject that is secondary in most studies, which concentrate on """"""""the disease of the soul"""""""" or on the social fate of outcasts. Over fifty medical treatises have been analyzed, and about twenty more --several of these available only in manuscripts-- await examination. The texts illuminate the physicians' attempts to understand a baffling disease, to recognize its true symptoms, and to mitigate its hopeless outcome. Discussions of """"""""lepra,"""""""" regardless of its relation to Hansen's Disease, yield exceptional insights into the early development of medicine, both as a science and as a profession. The affliction stimulated questions about the fundamental theory of humors and particularly about the role of melancholy (""""""""black bile""""""""), raised issues of contagion and heredity, straddled the dichotomy of skin and whole body, and challenged dietary assumptions. The more comprehensively the writings are studied, the more clearly they reflect changing pathologies, from dependence on etymology, syllogism, and analogy to definition by morbid processes and manifestations. Comprehensive inquiry, requiring an effort to collate as many materials as possible, also reveals changes in the practitioners' diagnostic techniques and descriptions, which paralleled their expanding role in the examination or """"""""judgment"""""""" of suspected lepers. Such judgments often resulted in official declarations or certificates, which until now have been consulted primarily in a judicial or demographic framework. The certificates afford incomparable insights not only into the actual application of academic notions, but also into the complex impact of medical learning and practice, and occasionally also into the concerns of patients and their families. Examiners justified their verdict with appeals to textbooks; while it was predictable, though not certain, that a positive finding led to lifelong isolation, being cleared might bring freedom but also deny charitable succor. In the most poignant cases, an examination was requested or contested by a worried individual. These certificates, which remain scattered in archives across Europe, primarily in France and Germany, provide an indispensable counterweight to the analysis of academic treatises.
