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Hansen discovered the bacteria in 1873 in unstained material and is therefore recognized as the discoverer of the leprosy pathogen. Hansen is a very common surname but in contrast Armauer is a very rare surname. Gerhard Henrik Hansen added the maiden name of his grandmother on his mother's side to his name early on. This happened not only out of family attachments but also as a physician and aspiring scientist to set himself apart from other Hansens.

Leprosy was a well-recognized and dreaded disease in medieval Europe. The disease is reported to have reached Germany with the Roman invasion and it was present in Scandinavia in the first centuries AD. This paper estimates and analyzes the frequency of leprosy among adult people buried in one of five medieval cemeteries in the city of Schleswig. Seven different dichotomous osteological lesions indicative of leprosy were analyzed, and it was possible to score at least one of these conditions on 350 adult skeletons (aged 15 or older). The scores were transformed to a statistic indicating the likelihood that the person to whom the skeleton belonged suffered from leprosy. It was found that the frequency of leprosy in the five cemeteries varied between 9 and 44%. Four of the five cemeteries showed frequencies ranging from 35 and 44% and with no statistically significant differences among them. The fifth cemetery showed a significantly lower frequency of leprosy (9%). The distribution of female age at death does not appear to be affected by leprosy status. This means that females experienced a considerably elevated risk of dying once they had contracted leprosy as the disease usually has a mid-adulthood age of onset. In four of the five cemeteries males with leprosy died in higher ages than men without leprosy--in two of the cemeteries the difference was statistically significant. This indicates that leprosy usually added less to the risk of dying among men than among women in medieval Schleswig.

This paper provides insight into interdependent processes by which leprosy and foreignness were constructed in early modern Germany. The results are based on a case study and further source-samples from Imperial towns of the Swabian and Franconian district. As it seems the early modern period was characterized by an ambivalent attitude towards lepers resulting in a variety of ways of inclusion and of exclusion for these persons: The separation from certain forms of social life in the towns (and in the villages belonging to the respective territory) followed the "suspicion" by other inhabitants caused by physical "signs" and the confirmed diagnoses of leprosy by medical experts. Such alienation from one community was juxtaposed by a right to enter the towns in rather specific circumstances as group of alms-beggars or part of a festive community and to join the community of leprosaria. The admission to such houses on the other hand was associated with the status of a burgher, a status, however, which could not be gained by everybody and was not fixed for life but was flexible. We found evidence that the status of leprosarium-"burgher" could be negotiated, interchanged, abandoned by lepers or be granted, refused, denied, suspended by the authorities--temporarily and permanently. By such means affiliation and foreignness were constructed. Preliminary analysis of numbers at ceremonies suggest that a large number of lepers was mobile--whether voluntarily or forced has still to be found out. And they represented the double fold estranged who, albeit, were temporarily included into the celebrating or commemorating community. Such forms of inclusion of the excluded, on the other hand, caused suspicion of simulation which became increasingly the preoccupation of the authorities.

The article aims to explore the physicians' role at the Nuremberg "Sondersiechenalmosen" in the 15th and 16th centuries. Special attention is given to the question as to how the city's physicians, who claimed expert status superior to other healers and who had special authority to advise the authorities in keeping the city clean and healthy, declared and explained their problems in connection with the "examen leprosorum" on the occasion of the "Sondersiechenschau". From 1394 the city had opened its gates for three days in Holy Week leading up to Easter to offer clerical assistance, food and shelter to foreign lepers. This meant that people were cared for who would not usually have been admitted because they were foreigners as well as being leprous. The physicians' task within that charity was to discriminate between the leprous and foreign beggars, a task which caused serious problems when, in the 16th century, at times two thousand and more foreigners entered the imperial city during Holy Week. When, in 1571, the Nuremberg physician Kammermeister proposed to establish a "Collegium Medicum" in the city of Nuremberg, he described the procedure extensively. The authorities ignored the initial claim to establish a "Collegium Medicum" but requested each academically trained physician of the city to give a personal statement on the physicians' ability to seriously judge the foreigners who claimed to be leprous. Based primarily on these statements, the article hopes to shed some light on the Nuremberg "Sondersiechenalmosen", on the "examen leprosorum", and on the relation between medical judgement and medical authority in general.

Leprosy was a well-recognized and dreaded disease in medieval Europe (5th-15th century AD). It is reported to have reached Germany with the Roman invasion. A much larger fraction than previously assumed appears to have been affected by leprosy in the medieval period. This article estimates the frequency (i.e., the prevalence at death) of leprosy among adult people buried in the Lauchheim early medieval cemetery. Seven different dichotomous osteological lesions indicative of leprosy are analyzed, and it is possible to score at least one of these conditions on 110 adult skeletons (aged 15 or more). The scores were transformed to a statistic--lambda (lambda)--indicating the likelihood that the person to whom the skeleton belonged suffered from leprosy. The analyses indicate that 16% (95% confidence interval: 9-23%) of adult people in Lauchheim died with osteological signs of leprosy. Leprosy was significantly more prevalent among men than women. The lambda statistic indicates that people who died with signs of leprosy did not differ in the distribution of age at death from those who did not have such signs. Some of the leprosy-related lesions had a statistically significant nonrandom dispersal on the cemetery; but there is no clear pattern to this and the significant results could be easily attributed to a type-1 error in the statistical analysis., (2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.)

This paper presents a new, only recently identified source on Saxon hospitals in the Middle Ages, a list, compiled between 1553 and 1586 under the government of elector August (1526-1586), of the districts and towns with hospitals for old and poor people, sickly persons, lepers, syphilitics and patients with other infectious diseases. Run by the towns or, partially, in connection with monasteries and churchs, by the court of Dresden too, these institutions provided lodging, nourishment, clothes and physical care to the indigent inmates. A medical therapy in a stricter sense was the exception in that s time.

Leprosy was nearly eliminated in central Europe by the beginning of 18th century. In the 2nd half of the 19th century, leprosy was imported by Lithuanian rural workers immigrating from the Russian empire into East Prussia. At that time, the ways of infection, the bacteria, and essential diagnostic methods were already known, but there was no effective treatment. A leprosarium was founded in 1899 in Memel. Legislation in 1900 and 1904 regulated the fight against the disease. The patients had to be isolated and not allowed to work with others, in contrast to the situation with cutaneous tuberculosis. Patients with lupus vulgaris, which was not infectious, even had suitable jobs in hospitals. In 1907, Antileprol (Bayer) became available, the first industrial preparation developed from chaulmoogra oils, which had been long used in Indian medicine. The situation of patients, however, remained nearly unchanged, up to the middle of the 20th century, when the first effective mycobacteriostatic agents were introduced.

The present paper examines the first attempts to internationalize the problem of leprosy, a subject hitherto overlooked by historians of imperialism and disease. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw many in the 'civilized countries' of the imperialist West gripped by a paranoia about an invasion of leprosy via germ-laden immigrants and returning expatriates who had acquired the infection in leprosy-endemic colonial possessions. Such alarmists clamoured for the adoption of vigorous leper segregation policies in such colonies. But the contagiousness of leprosy did not go unquestioned by other westerners. The convocation in Berlin of the first international meeting on leprosy revealed the interplay of differing and sometimes incompatible views about the containment of leprosy by segregation. The roles of officials from several countries, as well as the roles of five protagonists (Albert Ashmead, Jules Goldschmidt, Edvard Ehlers, Armauer Hansen, and Phineas Abraham) in the shaping of the Berlin Conference are here examined.

During his years of study in Switzerland and Germany, Adolpho Lutz published his first articles on zoology, clinical practice, and therapeutics. In Limeira, São Paulo, he began studies on animal and human diseases caused by germs and parasites. In 1885-86, Lutz traveled to Hamburg to study the morphology of germs related to skin diseases, in conjunction with Paul Gerson Unna, one of Germany's foremost dermatologists. He proposed the inclusion of Hansen's and Koch's bacilli in a new genus. In 1889, Unna nominated his student as physician-in-chief of the Leper Settlement on Molokai Island, Hawaii. From then on, Lutz sustained the theory that the disease was transmitted by mosquitos. He conducted research to prove this theory when he was head of the Instituto Bacteriológico de São Paulo (1893-1908) and, later, after he moved to the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (1908-1940). Although this research was not successful, on commissions and at congresses in which he participated until his death in October 1940, he still held to his conviction that leprosy was transmitted by mosquitoes.

In Erfurt, one of the greatest towns of Germany in the middle ages, the leprosy rules from the beginning of the 13th to the beginning of the 17th century: a appearance, which was then typical for the development of this malady in Germany. The leprosy-patients was isolated in special hospitals. Her number vacillated between four and two.

This overview attempts to evaluate, in general, the results of nearly 2,000 years of writings on the history of leprosy. The ancients, although prone to confuse other skin diseases with leprosy, laid the emotional foundation for later work in superstitution and lore. Their efforts were faithfully copied for hundreds of years and provided at least an accumulation of facts and a documentation of the state of the art. The dawn of scientific medicine in the mid-nineteenth century and the following 125 years has brought an increasing specialization of research in the history of leprosy that might be usefully divided into medical, political, Biblical, instutional, and medieval aspects. Some of the most productive efforts within each of these areas are considered. The challenge of the future is to develop models of analysis and evaluation based on the findings of analysis and evaluation based on the findings of social scientific research rather than relying totally on pure narration. This is the way in which to free the history of leprosy from much of the myth and error that surrounds it.