The remains were excavated from the site of one of UK's earliest known hospitals, near Winchester, Hampshire.
Scientific detective work suggests the man was a religious pilgrim who may have caught the disease on his travels.
University of Winchester researchers think leprosy may have become common in Europe in the Middle Ages because of the great pilgrimages of the period. Dr Simon Roffey, of the University of Winchester, said investigations of the skeleton have shed light on one of the ways that leprosy might have arrived in England. Leprosy is an infection caused by a bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. It has been a human disease for thousands of years and was recorded in ancient China, Egypt and India.
The remains, belonging to a man who was between 18 and 25 years old, were designated Sk27 by the researchers from the University of Winchester Department of Archaeology and University of Surrey. The leprosy strain sampled from the skeleton was also found to be genetically distinct, meaning that in life, he was quite the traveler.
Analysis of skull and tooth enamel showed that he was not local to Winchester or even northern Europe and possibly came from southern Europe or northern Africa. He also showed signs of early leprosy, although unlike with other skeletons in the cemetery, his bones were not riddled with lesions. DNA evidence of the bacteria and skeletal lesions were found only in the area of his feet and legs, but the researchers believe that he suffered from obvious skin and soft tissue lesions and perhaps facial paralysis due to nerve damage.
Tests for other pathogens were negative. Carbon and nitrogen isotope results revealed that his diet was high in animal protein, most likely of the seafood variety. Compared with others in the cemetery who were lacking in such a rich diet, Sk27 was either a man of some means or a newcomer to the population.
Researchers have questioned the link between the increase in pilgrimages and the spread of leprosy. At the time, pilgrims associated visiting religious shrines and sites with miraculous cures and healing, including those who suffered from leprosy. Winchester itself was attractive in this regard because it was full of shrines and hospitals in the 12th century and was a bustling city in its own right.
It was also a key focal point within a network of pilgrim routes. Gould disputes such accounts of the leper's mass, arguing that this practice "was largely a sixteenth-century concoction and in England, at least, was never performed" 8. But whether or not these living funerals actually took place in the Middle Ages, the leper's mass became inextricable from post-medieval understandings of the Middle Ages and its treatment of leprosy, resulting in the kind of medievalism that would play a role in concretizing the negative stigma that attached to the disease among Westerners, in particular.
Alongside the bubonic plague, leprosy was one of the most prevalent and feared diseases in the Middle Ages until it all but died out in Europe in the sixteenth century. During the imperial age of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, leprosy once again threatened Western populations when colonists were forced to confront the leprosy epidemics of East and South Asian countries, as well as that of Hawaii, which helped to reinvigorate its stigma.
Moran, "The combination of Christian missionary ventures, scientific medicine, and U. Catholic and Protestant missionaries, in particular, promoted a Biblical understanding of the disease that combined the Old Testament view of leprosy with the New Testament view, presenting native populations as helpless sinners who required the intervention of believers for both conversion and healing.
Not only did this medievalist view add to stigma of the disease, but it also informed its treatment, as the increasingly widespread practice of segregation was largely based on a misinformed understanding of the function and purpose of medieval leprosaria, which were built by medieval clergymen largely for the purpose of "garner[ing] the fruits of both perpetual charity and perpetual prayer" but which had the additional effect of benefiting the health of the leprous population Richards Gould speculates that medieval people would have been "baffled" by the idea of segregation for the purposes of contagion, although as the writings of Guy de Chauliac suggest, medieval people do seem to have been somewhat fearful of the disease's communicability, even if they were not nearly as focused on its contagion as were nineteenth-century medical professionals 7.
Either way, there is little doubt that religious missionaries and Western colonists alike weaponized their misinformed view of the Middle Ages in order to isolate and discriminate against native populations, which they did under the auspices of protecting the Euro-American population from the ravages of a foreign and ancient disease.
As the threat grew, the Molokai settlement in Hawaii and leper hospital at Carville came to exemplify these discriminatory tendencies, in which the practices and rituals of the Middle Ages were misconstrued and used to justify segregation at both sites. In , approximately five-hundred years after Guy de Chauliac published his symptomology of leprosy, Hansen discovered the bacterium that causes leprosy, thus setting the stage for decades of scientific research into the disease that would eventually take his name.
A decade after his discovery, in , an Anglican archdeacon named Henry Wright warned about the "Imperial Danger" of leprosy in India, which he feared would be brought back to England by British colonizers who had contracted the disease from the colonized population qtd.
Wright, along with the Protestant and Catholic missionaries that had traveled to many of the same countries, encouraged a "Christian" approach to its treatment, though it was only Christian insofar as it relied on an interpretation of Scripture as mandating isolation for people with leprosy, as was mandated for the Hebrews in Leviticus.
This antiquated and dehumanizing form of treatment was sanctioned by medical doctors like Dr. George Thin, author of the book Leprosy , who "believed that medieval regimes had literally followed the Old Testament injunction to capture and confine lepers and that this policy had led to the disappearance of leprosy in Europe by the end of the sixteenth century" Watts In accordance with this understanding of Scripture, the segregation of leprosy patients became standard practice in the colonies, while Christian missionaries became the patients' primary caretakers.
One of these colonies was the isolated territory of Hawaii, which suffered several devastating epidemics shortly after the arrival of Euro-American colonists and Chinese immigrants in the mids. In , Hawaii's king, under the influence of Western colonists and the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, signed the Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy, which aimed to isolate the leprous population from the non-leprous population.
Similar to the medieval form of diagnosis, in which individuals were effectively convicted of leprosy, people suspected of leprosy were arrested and delivered to the Hawaiian Board of Health, where they were inspected for signs of the disease and subsequently isolated if the case required it Inglis As the number of individuals requiring isolation increased, the island of Molokai, which was both self-sufficient and difficult to access, was established as a settlement for the quarantine of Hawaiians with leprosy.
Molokai quickly became the most famous settlement for leprosy patients in the world, though not because the administrators' treatment of leprosy was particularly innovative or enlightened, but because one of its voluntary residents became an international celebrity after contracting the disease from the people he had spent years caring for, which made him a martyr among Westerners who continued to view the disease in Biblical and medieval terms. For several years in the late s, Father Damien de Veuster, a Catholic priest from Belgium, cared for people with leprosy on the island of Molokai until he contracted the disease himself in the s.
Father Damien's tale held a literary attraction as well; Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an epistolary defense of Damien's actions on Molokai in , and the letter became the basis of several hagiographic biographies of the saint, including Gavin Daws' Holy Man , as well as John Farrow's Damien the Leper , which I explore here.
While Gould describes John Farrow as one of Damien's "less reliable" biographers, its accuracy is not the point Damien the Leper is, rather, an attempt to mythologize Damien by reconstructing his story in such a way that he becomes a modern-day hero facing down a medieval disease.
Farrow's glowing portrayal of Damien as a nineteenth-century saint resembles the hagiographies of the Middle Ages, in that it portrays his virtuous actions among the Hawaiians as miraculous and depicts his death as a form of martyrdom.
More significantly, however, Farrow's hagiographic account of the priest's life contributed to the mythology that had been constructed around the disease for centuries, emphasizing leprosy's cultural effects rather than its medical complexities, even as new treatments were being discovered at the time of the book's publication.
In the opening pages of Damien the Leper , John Farrow recounts his encounter with a Native Hawaiian during a trip to the islands for research. He recalls the horror he felt upon discovering that he would be sharing a house with one of the leprosy patients:. I shall never forget that afternoon. I was angry and afraid. I stared at the glittering surfaces of the bed as though I might be able to detect germs. I scratched and scratched again before the agonizing irritations of countless imaginary itchings.
I looked at my skin, half expecting to find the fatal white markings, and I scrubbed my body with strong disinfectants until the blood ran.
Farrow's hysterical reaction to discovering he might have to share a bed with an individual diagnosed with leprosy speaks to the fear of physical contagion that, by the twentieth century, had displaced fears of its moral contagion as Westerners' primary misconception of the disease. When Farrow finally meets the man, however, he is drawn in by the story the man tells of Kamiano the Hawaiian name for Damien , of whom the man speaks with such a degree of reverence that he genuflects upon speaking his name.
Already, Farrow's biography has begun to supplant the humanity of the Native Hawaiians with the sanctity of the legendary Belgium priest. This is a recurring theme in Damien the Leper : the so-called "lepers of Molokai" are repeatedly equated with the sick pilgrims of medieval saints' lives, whose cure by the saint's healing touch is less important for the relief it gives the pilgrim than for the miraculous proof it offers the saint.
Damien's illness is, for Farrow, a sign of sanctity rather than sin, but it illustrates that a moralizing view of the disease based on misconstrued Biblical and medieval views always seems to cling to it, whether that view is positive or negative. After a brief account of Damien's childhood and schooling, Farrow narrates the priest's fateful voyage to the Hawaiian Islands as part of a mission for the Order of the Sacred Hearts.
There, Damien learns about Molokai, a small tract of land bounded by the sea, which was purchased by colonial administrators in the s so that individuals diagnosed with leprosy could be sent there to separate them from the healthy population. The cruel irony of the establishment of this particular leper colony, Farrow notes, is that leprosy, along with several other diseases, were "unknown before the arrival of the white man"—that is, the colonists The medievalism of Farrow's depiction of the natives as primitive and immoral establishes the conditions for Damien's saintly intervention, which includes both his conversion of and his care for the lepers of Molokai.
Against the protests of local authorities, Damien goes to live among the inhabitants of the island. In a letter to his brother that Farrow includes in his biography, Damien describes his decision to live on the island as "a second death," alluding intentionally or not to the practice of arresting and isolating Native Hawaiians on Molokai, where they suffered both a lifelong exile and a form of civil death Seeing the disease as a threat to the Hawaiians' bodies and souls, Damien immediately establishes himself as the natives' spiritual savior, encouraging them to shed their barbaric customs by holding weekly mass and performing the sacraments.
Since healthy individuals, even medical professionals, are not allowed on Molokai, Damien also serves as Molokai's de facto physician, setting up a hospital, installed with cots, in which Damien not only washes and bandages the patients' sores but also performs crude amputations when necessary.
While such interventions differ from the saintly interventions of medieval hagiography, in which a single touch from the saint could cure a pilgrim's disease, Farrow portrays Damien's rudimentary medical acts as nonetheless miraculous, in that Damien, despite having no medical training, was able to help his patients stave off death, at least for a time.
Damien is not, however, able to stave off the disease himself. A few years into his service on Molokai, Damien discovers that he has contracted the disease when he spills boiling water on his foot and feels no sensation, a symptom of the disease he instantly recognizes. He shares the news of his disease with his parishioners during Mass, when, Farrow recounts, "instead of addressing them with the usual My brethren , he had said, slowly and significantly, We lepers …" Farrow's retelling of Damien's contraction of the disease, his slow decline, and his eventual death is a highly contrived—and, indeed, hagiographic—account of Damien's so-called martyrdom on Molokai.
Even the account of Damien's announcement to his parishioners that he had contracted the disease is likely exaggerated, even inaccurate. Gould writes that Damien addressed his audience as "we lepers" for years before he contracted the disease; he argues that "it wasn't an affectation, as it might have been from the lips of another; it was a simple statement of identification: Damien embraced leprosy long before leprosy embraced him" In addition to such factual inaccuracies, many of the tropes of hagiography are on display in the biography's final pages.
Thus, for example, when Damien is on his deathbed, his assistant—a newly arrived priest named Joseph Dutton—asks that he be left Damien's mantle so that "like Elias, I may inherit your great heart" Dutton's request makes of the mantle a saint's relic, or an accessory of the saint's that could purportedly heal conditions like blindness, deafness, and broken bones. This comparison is not lost on Damien, who jokingly responds, "What would you do with it?
Even more so than the token of the mantle, the moments following Damien's death mark him as saint-like. When the Sisters of the St. Francis order subsequently examine Damien's corpse, one of them exclaims that "all signs of leprosy had disappeared from the face! The erasure of scars from the face and the absence of decomposition in the bodies of saints is a hagiographic commonplace; Reginald of Durham's account of the posthumous miracula of Saint Cuthbert, for example, narrates how Cuthbert's corpse, when examined, was found to be whole, pliable, almost uncannily lifelike—with flexible joints and an elasticity of the skin such that it seemed to breathe Tudor As the Sister's exclamation implies, Damien, like Cuthbert, displays a similarly miraculous postmortem appearance.
Farrow's hagiographic depiction of Damien is likely purposeful, as it aligns with the larger project of myth-making that surrounded Damien for decades after his death, and it is in the service of the myths that have attached to leprosy for centuries. In fact, Peter Richards notes that "most people have a natural resistance to the disease" xv. Native Hawaiians were particularly susceptible to leprosy because their years of isolation had not allowed them to build up an immunity to the diseases that the colonists brought to the island Gould Gavan Daws speculates that in Damien's case, his prolonged exposure to the leprosy bacterium, along with the fact that he inhabited an intimate and unclean environment at Molokai, likely played a role in his contraction of the disease Simply because Damien contracted the disease on Molokai, however, does not mean that contracting the disease is easy or, indeed, common.
Moreover, that Farrow chooses to preserve Robert Louis Stevenson's characterization of Damien's death as a "martyrdom," despite the progress made in the treatment of the disease in the intervening decades, implies that the disease was passed on by people who were not only physically ill but morally corrupt qtd. In many saints' lives, martyrdom occurs when ostensibly immoral pagans persecute and eventually execute a Christian saint. Stevenson and Farrow, in calling Damien a martyr, thus equate the fatal passage of leprosy from the Native Hawaiians to the Christian priest with the pagans' killing of saints in hagiography, suggesting that the Hawaiians share the moral depravity of pagans.
Farrow's purposeful mythologizing of the person he calls "Damien the Leper" ultimately illustrates the book's inherent diagnostic medievalism, or knowing use of misconstrued medieval paradigms of leprosy in the face of scientific evidence that would dispute notions of the disease's moral and medical contagion. That this medievalist portrayal of leprosy appears as late as the s reinforces the point that is not the disease, but rather the stigma that is contagious, its cultural and metaphorical meanings sticking to individuals like sores that won't heal.
At the entrance to the National Hansen's Disease Museum in Carville, Louisiana, there is a plaque that commemorates the lives of the patients who were treated at the in-patient hospital that stood at the site from to It reads, in part:.
Welcome to a community unlike any other in the world, many of whose residents experienced two opposite emotional extremes—one is extraordinary physical suffering, separation of families, endless psychological stress, emotional breakdown, and another is security, healing and comfort—a haven—a place to hide.
Gaudet For over a century, Carville was the only hospital for people with leprosy in the continental United States. Definition: The official disease, leprosy, produced by Mycobacterium leprae, was not scientifically identified until , and the cause for the disease was not proven until the s. The general characteristics of the disease include, but are not limited to: --loss of sensation at the nerve ends --destroyed blood vessels, ligaments and skin tissues --eroded bones --sores --ulcers --scabs Issues: Treatment of lepers in Christian and Islamic Societies: Although lepers were isolated and treated differently than other members of society in both religious cultures, the medieval treatment of lepers in Islamic society seemed to be less harsh than in Christian societies.
There are common religious interpretations in both Christian and Islamic societies regarding leprosy, but the effect of such interpretation appeared to be less " marginalizing" in Islamic societies. In Islamic society, there was little evidence of lepers being required to wear distinctive clothing. The association of lepers with the "unclean" is seen in the popularity of baths as a treatment for leprosy, but this occurred mostly in areas of Christian influence, such as the Crusader states.
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