Angela
Veteran member
- Messages
- 21,793
- Reaction score
- 12,345
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
I've always associated leprosy with warmer climates, but I guess not. I also had always thought that it needed close personal contact for transmission, but apparently it can even be transmitted via inanimate objects, so much "catchier" than I thought. I've had a horror of it since I saw Ben Hur on television. The emphasis on Father Damian in Catholic schools didn't help either.
See:
https://www.archaeology.org/news/6046-171025-england-leprosy-skull
"CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—Sarah Inskip of the University of Cambridge says that red squirrel pelts and meat traded by the Vikings of Denmark and Sweden could have introduced leprosy to southeastern England, according to a BBC Newsreport. A strain of the incurable disease, which has also been found in medieval Scandinavian skeletons, was discovered in a medieval woman’s skull dating to between A.D. 885 and 1015. The victim lived in the East of England, where squirrel products probably came into the country through the ports at Kings Lynn and Yarmouth. Inskip suggests the disease became endemic in the East of England earlier than in other parts of the country, requiring the construction of the island’s first leper hospitals in the eleventh century A.D."
See:
https://www.archaeology.org/news/6046-171025-england-leprosy-skull
"CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—Sarah Inskip of the University of Cambridge says that red squirrel pelts and meat traded by the Vikings of Denmark and Sweden could have introduced leprosy to southeastern England, according to a BBC Newsreport. A strain of the incurable disease, which has also been found in medieval Scandinavian skeletons, was discovered in a medieval woman’s skull dating to between A.D. 885 and 1015. The victim lived in the East of England, where squirrel products probably came into the country through the ports at Kings Lynn and Yarmouth. Inskip suggests the disease became endemic in the East of England earlier than in other parts of the country, requiring the construction of the island’s first leper hospitals in the eleventh century A.D."