Page:Tropical Diseases.djvu/657



Definition.— A chronic infective granulomatous disease produced by a specific bacterium, and characterized by lesions of the skin, nerves, and viscera eventuating in local anæsthesia, ulceration, and a great variety of trophic lesions. After a long course it is almost invariably fatal.

History.— The many allusions in the oldest Chinese, Indian, Syrian, and Egyptian writings to a chronic, disfiguring, and fatal affection possessing well-marked and characteristic skin lesions, warrant us in concluding that the disease now known as leprosy was as common and familiar in the East in times of remotest antiquity as it is at the present day. There is some evidence— necessarily of a negative character— that leprosy is of comparatively recent introduction into Europe. The earlier Greek .and Latin writers do not mention the disease. Hippocrates, who, had he been practically acquainted with leprosy, would undoubtedly have described it accurately and fully, makes but brief allusion to the subject. Aristotle is the first of the Greek writers to give an unequivocal description. We may infer, therefore, that the introduction of leprosy into Greece probably took place between the time of Hippocrates and that of Aristotle— that is to say, between 400 B.C. and 345 B.C. Most likely it came from Egypt. In the time of Celsus— 53 B.C. to A.D. 7— it was still a rare disease in Italy ; but during the earlier centuries of our era it increased there, and, probably following in the wake of the Roman conquests, it appears to