Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Leprosy and local leper hospitals / by Henry Barnes. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![is considered. The hospital at Sherburn near Durham* was the largest, and had accommodation for 65 patients ; St. Nicholas at Carlisle had 13, and the hospital at Bolton in Northumberland had also 13 patients. These hospitals were intended merel}' as institutions to seclude the infected, and not as places in which a cure was to be attempted. Indeed, so strong was the belief that the disease set at defiance the resources of medical skill, that in a trial for witchcraft at Edinburgh, so late as 1597, among the gravest accusations against the pri- soner was thist:— She afifirmit she could haill leprosie, quhilk the maist expert men in medecine are not abil to do. Her remedy sounds strangely to modern ears. She took a reid cock, slew it, baked a bannock with the blude of it, and gaf the samyn to the leper to eat. All classes of the community were liable to be attacked with this dread disease, and even kings were not exempt from it. In the Chronicle of Lanercost, speaking of the invasion of England in 1326, it is stated that the Scottish Army was not led by Bruce in person, because he had become a leper. Chronicon de Lanercost, p. 259. Dominus autem Robertus de Brus, quia factus fuerat leprosus, ilia vice cum eis non intravit. and a few pages further on, p. 264, in recording Bruce's death, it says— Mortuus est Dominus Robertus Brus, Rex Scotias leprosus. The fact of Bruce's leprosy is attested by several authors. Hemingford,t a contemporary of Bruce's, de- * Surtees Antiquities of Durham, vol. i, p. 127. Nicolson & Burn's History of Westmorland and Cumberland, Vol. II, p. 250. t Pitcairn's Criminal Trials in Scotland. Vol. II, p. 29. + Heminfordii Chronicon (Hearne's Ed., 1731) Tom II, p. 270. [N] ^■■''^^](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22279805_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
