Elephantiasis graecorum, or true leprosy / by Robert Liveing.

  • Liveing, Robert, 1834-1919.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elephantiasis graecorum, or true leprosy / by Robert Liveing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    Greeks (i.e. psoriasis), but to designate true leprosy; in which sense it is also used in the Septuagint. Constantinus Africanus, in the eleventh century, appears to have introduced a modified form of the Arabian teaching into the school at Salerno, ajid the authors of that school divide true leprosy into four varieties—Elephantiasis, Leonina, Alopecia., and Tyria. With them ' lepra' is the general term for a disease of which elephantiasis is only one particular form. We can understand, then, how in the four- teenth century, when the old Greek and Latin authors were re-introduced, great confusion arose, in consequence of the same names being applied to very different diseases, and this confusion has hardly disappeared even in the present day. To state the matter in a concise form, we have 1st. Elephantiasis Grgecorum, equivalent to lepra Arabum, or true leprosy ; 2nd. Elephantiasis Arabum, or the Barbadoes leg, unknown to the early Greets ; 3rd. Lepra Greecorum, answering to our psori- asis.1 Whoever reads carefully the account of leprosy (Zaraath) given in Leviticus, must arrive at the conclusion that several distinct diseases are included under one and the same name. One reason for this 1 A full account of this part of the subject will be found in ' The Study of Medicine,' by Mason Good (1822), vol. ii. p. 851, and vol. iv. p. 574, from which Hebra's account appears to have been in part taken.