Medico-Legal Considerations on Banishing Lepers in a Noted Treatise of Late Sixteenth Century

Summary: Leprosy was one of the oldest known diseases considered as a legal death. Egypt constituted in the most ancient times one of the three greatest sources (the others were China and India) from which leprosy has gone extending to the eastern Mediterranean world of the first millennium BCE. From Egypt the disease reached Mesopotamia and Greece, the Mediterranean regions and the western countries from where the whole Europe was subsequently invaded. The specific criteria legally applied to confine lepers did not conflict with religious, medical, legal and ethical values for centuries. Lepers were not only banished from the community and classed as spiritual outcasts, but also lost all their legal and civil rights. The long process, through which rulers were granted the legitimate right to use physical force against them began with the Jewish law, whereby the leper was excluded from the congregation of the Lord. In mediaeval society, the social response to leprosy was exclusion and this practice was not completely abandoned until the nineteenth century. At the end of the thirteenth century, lepers were cast out of the city and forced to live beyond the city limits. During the sixteenth century in spite of the new medical theories leprosy remained isolated from Sanity and lepers continued to be expelled from the social community. In 1583, Giovan Filippo Ingrassia, Protomedicus of the Sicilian Kingdom, wrote an essay confuting the reasons underlying the surviving practice of casting lepers out of the city.