Leprosy in premodern medicine
Subtitle: a malady of the whole body
By: Luke Demaitre.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Baltimore, MD
Language: eng
Number of pages: 323
ISBN-13: 9780801886133
Description: While premodern poets and preachers viewed leprosy as a "disease of the soul," physicians in the period understood it to be a "cancer of the whole body." In this innovative study, medical historian Luke Demaitre explores medical and social perspectives on leprosy at a time when judicious diagnosis could spare healthy people from social ostracization and help the afflicted get a license to beg.