On the etiology of leprosy / by G. Armauer Hansen, assistant physician to the leper hospitals at Bergen, Norway.

  • Gerhard Armauer Hansen
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the etiology of leprosy / by G. Armauer Hansen, assistant physician to the leper hospitals at Bergen, Norway. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    rest on when we can also show other cases for which contagion furnishes the most probable explanation. All information is wanting as regards possible contact with other lepers; and for tliis there has been in Bergen, and still is, tolerably abundant opportunity, as the inmates of the various asylums have more or less limited intercourse with the town, while the inhabitants of the town have also access to the asylums. In the last few years the following four cases of leprosy have been quoted in Bergen— 1. Anders Hegrenaas, 63 years old, labourer, tubercular form; born in Jolster; states the duration of the disease to have been about three years in 1871. Does not know any leper in the family, which is also probable, as leprosy is very rare in Jolster, and he is not related to any of the lepers who have been registered since ] 856. He has been in Bergen more than twenty years ; quitted thirteen years ago his service at Lungegaard Hospital, where he had been bathing attendant four years, and therefore had been in close contact with the patients. 2. Anne Larsdatter Starefos, 51 years old, tubercular form; came twenty years ago to Bergen, and dwelt with a sister at Starefos, a farm which lies high up on the Fioifjeld, close to the Asylum No, 1 and the Lungegaard Hospital. She was washer- woman at the Asylum No. 1 for ten years, and three years after she ceased to be so her leprosy was undoubted, but she had, how- ever, long been suspected of not being healthy. She earned her living at that time by washing bottles in a beer brewery. She was born on the farm Munie, in a mountain valley about two miles from Bergen. All people there are agreed that there never has been any leprosy in the valley. It is in any case certain that her parents, their brothers and sisters and parents, have all been healthy, and that she is the only leper known iu the families from which her parents descend. 3. Joachim Berentsen, sailor, 26 years, tubercular form. His parents, who are still living, were born in Bergen. The parents of his sixty-years-old father (Lars Andersen) were both born in Indre Holmedal; they moved so early to Bergen that all their nine children, of whom the patient's father is the youngest, were born in Bergen. There are dwelling in Bergen grandchildren and great- grandchildren of them, who are all healthy. The mother's parents were from Horningdal, where there is no leprosy, and from Bergen. They had two daughters, of whom one has a healthy daughter, and the other has, besides our patient, two healthy children living. The patient resided at the age of fifteen years, in 1858-59, for half a year at Spidsoen, and durmg that time had intercourse with the peasants round about, and also with families where leprosy had existed. Kari Spidsoen, a girl of about the same age as the patient, 0
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