Leprosy and identity in the Middle Ages by Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati

Author:Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

This request offers a glimpse at a perception of the practice of medicine as simultaneously professional and charitable, qualities that have been too often represented as competing with each other in the late medieval care of the sick.71 The language of the examiners, as well as that of their supplicants, was attuned to the emotional and social experience of disease, in addition to its medical manifestations.

Conclusion

Taken together, prescriptive hospital statutes, records concerning hospital practice and Lepraschau letters reveal diverse responses to lepers and leprosy in the late medieval Rhineland. Moreover, the social effects of a diagnosis of leprosy were variable. As revealed by hospital documents, those identified as leprous continued to be connected to their neighbours, friends and family members, in ways not solely determined by their diagnosis. The location and social function of leprosaria were determined not primarily by attitudes towards the disease, but by hospitals’ status as religious institutions. This religious status was shared by the hospitals’ residents, both healthy and sick. The agency of the leprous themselves is revealed in the fact that they might seek to live in informal communities, without the privileges of religious status, but also without its restrictions. Lepers within hospitals were most commonly known as good people (guden leuden), while those in less permanent groupings appear often as the poor children of God. It is the latter who seem to have been the group most distinctively defined as lepers, without the legal privileges of religious status, not necessarily having obtained any formal diagnosis, and primarily dependent on alms. They might also appear as the ‘armen siechen ausgesetzt’, the poor sick set apart. As both hospital rules and Lepraschau letters reveal, however, such ‘setting apart’ could be narrowly defined and even customised, limiting certain types of social interaction, but not enforcing full segregation. The lepers of the Rhineland appear not only in groups, but as individuals – seeking or disputing medical diagnosis, receiving gifts or receiving care, wandering about or doing their shopping – good people, poor sick, and active participants in late medieval communities.

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