ounced in Herodotus and Galen is more
strongly insisted upon by Caelius Aurelianus who recommends isolation
of those affected. Paulus aegenita discusses the disease. The Arabian
writers have described elephantiasis graecorum under the name of juzam,
which their translators have rendered by the word lepra. Later,
Hensler, Fernel Pare, Vesalius, Horstius, Forestus, and others have
discussed it.

The statistics of leprosy in Europe pale before the numbers affected in
the East. The extent of its former ravages is unknown, but it is
estimated that at the present day there are over 250,000 lepers in
India, and the number in China is possibly beyond computation.
According to Morrow, in 1889 in the Sandwich Islands there were 1100
lepers in the settlement at Molokai. Berger states that there were 100
cases at Key West; and Blanc found 40 cases at New Orleans. Cases of
leprosy are not infrequently found among the Chinese on the Pacific
coast, and an occasional case is seen in the large cities of this
country. At the present day in Europe, where leprosy was once so well
known, it is never found except in Norway and the far East.

Possibly few diseases have caused so much misery and suffering as
leprosy. The banishment from all friends and relatives, the
confiscation of property and seclusion from the world, coupled with
poverty and brutality of treatment,--all emphasize its physical horror
a thousandfold. As to the leper himself, no more graphic description
can be given than that printed in The Ninteenth Century, August, 1884:
"But leprosy! Were I to describe it no one would follow me. More cruel
than the clumsy torturing weapons of old, it distorts, and scars, and
hacks, and maims, and destroys its victim inch by inch, feature by
feature, member by member, joint by joint, sense by sense, leaving him
to cumber the earth and tell the horrid tale of a living death, till
there is nothing left of him. Eyes, voice, nose, toes, fingers, feet,
hands, one after the other are slowly deformed and rot away, until at
the end of ten, fifteen, twenty years, it may be, the wretched leper,
afflicted in every sense himself, and hateful to the sight, smell,
hearing, and touch of others, dies, despised and the most abject of
men."

Syphilis.--Heretofore the best evidence has seemed to prove that
syphilis had its origin in 1494, during the siege of Naples by Charles
VIII of France; but in later days many investigators, prominent among
them Bur