I remember watching a documentary about a Greek town where they would send people with Leprosy. Why was leprosy such a big deal if 95% of people are immune to it?
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Leprosy is nasty. It comes up all throughout history, but I’m not sure why it isn’t around today.
The long and short of the disease is that it is highly contagious and causes people to essentially rot while alive. Like being a zombie, but without loosing all of your mental facilities or brain eating of course.
Before the cure for leprosy was discovered it was common throughout most of the world. North America was largely spared but the US did have it’s own leper colony in Louisiana. If you contracted leprosy you were sent there to die. Ancient sources tended to call every skin disease leprosy, even what we now call leprosy today is actually three different diseases with different origins.
Back in ye old days leprosy was used to describe a wide variety of skin disorders, only some of which we would today call leprosy. So “leprosy” could have meant actual leprosy or just some other dermal condition they either thought was leprosy, or didn’t have a separate word for.
But it was a bigger deal back then because if you did get it you were in trouble. Leprosy causes you to develop wounds you cannot feel. These wounds then become infected, and 500 years ago there weren’t antibiotics and things weren’t super sanitary.
Leprosy caused disfigurement. There was no cure. It was infectious. It was feared.
Google leper colony of Molokai in Hawaii.
I have no idea if it’s true that 95% of people were immune, but even if it is, I’m pretty sure that no-one knew if they were in the 95%. 1/20 is actually a lot of people.
As others have said, before the modern era, physicians weren’t particularly consistent with diagnosing skin conditions, so a lot of dermatological conditions were likely classified as “leprosy” which probably gave a mistaken impression of how common it was.
However, the reason people were sent to leper colonies instead of living in communities is more due to fear of disfigurement from the disease rather than because it was especially contagious. Smallpox was much more common than leprosy and much more fatal, but didn’t require people to be isolated. People were just very scared of a slow growing, disfiguring disease, and they believed it could be spread by touch or “bad air” so they just isolated people unnecessarily.
It wasn’t until the twentieth century before we realized leprosy was one disease and it was caused by mycobacterium. We also discovered that it wasn’t as contagious as previously thought and it could be treated with long courses of antibiotics.
Any illness is an issue in a time when you could have died from a paper cut…
Literally, before antibiotics any infection that your body cannot fight could been lethal… You caould get sepsis from a paper cut
It’s not so much about the disease itself, but the myths surounding it, especially since it was slow and disfiguring .
There’s a famous mass hysteria episode in France called the [Leper’s plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1321_lepers%27_plot) in the 14th century.
Mobs started attacking leper houses and killing everyone because of rumours that the *Lepers* were poisoning wells, paid by the *Jews*, themselves working on the orders of the *Iberian Muslims*… fun times…
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