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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    a. If the disease is contagious, it may be transmitted by contagion to the ovum, but is not hereditary. b. If the disease is not contagious, it is not in any way trans- mitted to the descendants. Though 1 cannot here go into particulars for evidence to support the above propositions, the reader will, perhaps, not find my conclu- sions too premature, when I conclude it highly probable that heredity and contagion are in direct contrast to each other. Engaged in investigations on the etiology of a disease the real cause of which is so entirely unknown as that of leprosy, the more circumstances I can bring forward to demonstrate the probability of one of the two alternatives existing or not, the more the probability of the other existing too will lose or gain. And this applies ahke to other diseases. It ought to be remembered that Virchow always has maintained, specially for cancer and tuberculosis, that nothing specific is inherited but a disposition of certain tissues for the special disease, A predisposition to a special infectious disease can hardly exist; one man may catch syphilis, favus, &c., more readily than another, but that no one is born with a disposition for catching only one special infectious disease and no other, can hardly be disputed. On the other hand, contagion may be regarded as an unfailing test of a disease being produced by a special virus. All attempts to point out the agents that in a specific or non- specific^ way should directly generate leprosy, have hitherto failed. The discussion on the various alleged causes may, in my opinion, rightly be postponed till one of the two alternatives, heredity or contagion, be proved. I will mention, however, that all of them, including miasma and the eating of tainted fish, may, with a degree of certainty be shown to be insufficient to account for the occurrence of leprosy in Norway—may even be excluded. On the other hand, it can be shown that some of them, viz. uncleanliness, the occu- pation of the people, in short the whole mode of life of our peasantry, are very favorable to the spread of contagious diseases. For this we have well-established facts, such as the almost awfully common occurrence of scabies, though much on the decrease of late years ; the spread of syphilis within families, in some instances most astonishing; the carrying about of typhoid fever by individuals among the fisher population congregated at certain times and places during the great fisheries. It may also be mentioned that in the cases of leprosy in England and Germany represented as having been engendered in those countries, and of which I have read accounts and descriptions, the symptoms have not agreed with the symptoms of leprosy as they manifest themselves in Norway. ' In Norway the assumed non-specific origin of leprosy is called spontaneous.
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