Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/489

476 the entering in of the gate, we are told, when that despairing conference was held which ended in their adventurous expedition. The Syrian army probably had driven them from their usual dwellings, to take shelter close to the city walls. Let us hope that the great service they conferred upon starving Samaria by discovering the enemy’s flight was not unrewarded—that there was granted them some slight mitigation of the rigour with which men in their unhappy condition were treated.

But we must pass on to later times. The Levitical law will furnish those who wish for them with particulars about the Jewish leper. Let us look at the history of leprosy subsequently to the Christian era.

It is very commonly believed that this malady was unknown in Europe before the time of the Crusades; but this opinion and the facts of the case are far from agreeing. Some centuries ere Peter the Hermit roused the chivalrous piety of the West against the encroaching infidel of the East, there are records of the existence of leprosy in the southern parts of our continent. In the seventh century we find Rhotaris, King of the Lombards, making stringent enactments with regard to the treatment of it. The leper was regarded as dead in law. He was forbidden to approach sound persons without giving them due warning; and for this purpose he was to be supplied with a wooden clapper. Already, at this time, lazarhouses were common throughout all Italy. In the eighth century, we read of the institution of these hospitals in Germany, under the superintendence of St. Othman, and in France, under St. Nicholas de Corbie. In the year of our salvation 757, King Pepin published edicts acknowledging leprosy as a plea of divorce, and excluding it from all intercourse with health and soundness; and these decrees were confirmed in 789 by Charles the Great. But, not to spend too much time on this question, it is sufficiently clear that this disease was extensively prevalent in Europe long before the eleventh century. There can be no doubt, however, that from the end of the first Crusade, down to the sixteenth century, it afflicted Europe with much greater severity than either before or after that period. Indeed one of the leading results of the Crusades was the introduction into the West of all manner of violent and (in the then state of medical science) irremediable distempers.

“The Crusaders,” says Michaud—he is writing of the conclusion of the sixth Crusade, but his remarks admit of a general application,—“The Crusaders, who were fortunate enough to revisit their homes, brought back nothing with them but the remembrance of most shameful disorders. A great number of them had nothing to show their compatriots but the chains of their captivity; nothing to communicate but the contagious maladies of the East. The historians we have followed are silent as to the ravages of the leprosy among the nations of the West; but the testament of Louis the Eighth, an historical monument of that period, attests the existence of two thousand Léproseries (hospitals for lepers) in the kingdom of France alone. This horrible sight,” he proceeds to observe, “must have been a subject of terror to the most fervent Christians, and was sufficient to disenchant in their eyes those regions of the East, where till that time their imagination had seen nothing but prodigies and marvels.” In another passage, discussing the benefits Europe derived from its contact with western Asia, he remarks that “it may be safely said that during the Crusades we received from the East many more serious diseases than true instruction in medicine. We know that there were numerous lazarhouses established in Europe at the time of the Crusades.” Leprosy then prevailed most extensively after the Crusades. It became the curse of every country. There was scarcely a town it did not visit. Its white scaly presence was known and dreaded everywhere. It walked the earth at its grim pleasure, and laid its desolating hand wheresoever it would. Family peace was dissolved before it. Some loved member, a father, it may be, was rudely torn by it, under the law’s approval, from the society of those dearest to him. Between them and him an insurmountable barrier was raised. His prospects of domestic happiness were blighted, and in the stead of them a life of isolation appointed him.

The leper, we are informed, was treated like a dead body. He was looked upon as a mortuum caput. The curse of social death fell upon him simultaneously with that other curse. So soon as the horrible symptoms manifested themselves in his person, he was legally and civilly extinct. The ceremonies of burial were performed over him. He heard his own obsequies celebrated, being yet in full strength and vigour. So Charles the Fifth, ex-Emperor of Germany, according to the old story, lay and listened to the chanting of his own requiem. Mass was duly said for the benefit of the leper’s soul, after this his formal interment, and those rites which separated the dead from the living completed, he proceeded to his appointed place. If the unsparing charity of the period had built and endowed a house for him and his fellow-sufferers, he was conducted to it at once. If no such institution existed, he was escorted by the priest and by his friends to a hut prepared for him outside the city walls. Arrived at his destination, he bade a long farewell to the train that had accompanied him, and in parting from them he parted from mankind. Henceforth his only associates were those upon whom had been passed a like sentence of excommunication. The busy, bustling world had cast him off. It had driven him out of the precincts of its sympathy and care.

Imagine the leper, in his little hut, when his position presented itself to his mind in full force. The melancholy procession has returned to the city, and those who formed it are re-united to life and to humanity. They are dispersed, each one to his own sphere of action, and the tide of energy and business is pulsing in their veins after its wont. But he, whom they followed to his tomb to-day, and resigned to despair and misery, sits in his cell, even as that novice described by the Roman satirist sits on the nether river’s bank, and shivers at the destiny before him. What remembrances crowd upon him! What pictures of days irrevocably past and gone! How his heart