Skin diseases and their remedies / by Robert J. Jordan.

  • Jordan, Henry J.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Skin diseases and their remedies / by Robert J. Jordan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    30/304 (page 14)
    century—a great stride, but the records of the intervening period are too few and obscure to enable us to depict the general state of chronic skin diseases in that space of time. We know that many of these affections did not then fail to harass man; and perhaps we may reason- ably presume that they existed in varying de- grees of prevalence and intensity during the pestilential periods of the first portion of the Christian era. In the 12th century, it had become manifest that skin affections had undergone a remarkable epidemic modification. They had increased largely both in amount and intensity ; and the most formidable of these diseases, tubercular leprosy, assumed a horrible prominence in the social life of this period and of that which immediately followed. It has been very commonly supposed that the tubercular leprosy which prevailed so extensively and severely throughout Europe from the 12th to the 16th century,inclusive, had beenimported into the Occident at the return of the first Crusaders. The incorrectness of this opinion is clearly shown by the fact, that the disease wras already well known in different parts of Europe