146 NOTES TO THE 



rum and Lepra Arabum must be regarded as synonymous terms, 

 and elephantiasis in some parts of Europe is still spoken of as 

 lepra. It was under the popular name of leprosy that elephan- 

 tiasis spread as an epidemic throughout England, Wales, Ireland, 

 and Scotland, and had its home in Great Britain for fifteen cen- 

 turies." It is stated by authors that the lepers are the type of 

 the satyrs of the poets ; this idea was remarkably illustrated by a 

 case which came under the treatment of Professor Erasmus 

 Wilson. He then continues as to the cause. " The danger is 

 greatest at the nutritive period of life, when growth is active, and 

 when the organization is busily attracting from without air and 

 food in abundant quantities and with considerable energy. It 

 may therefore be assumed that in certain countries, the cause, 

 whether atmospheric or telluric, is constantly present, and that 

 all that is necessary to give origin to the disease is a predisposi- 

 tion engendered by debility proceeding from whatever cause." 



There is another kind of leprosy, the Lepra Alphos of the 

 Greeks, or common white leprosy. It is an eruption of the in- 

 tegument, distinguished by the presence of a white scale looking 

 as if it were stuck upon the skin like a wafer, and of a circular 

 figure. I have in my library a remarkable book by Kichard 

 Mead, entitled, Medica Sacra, 1749. Dr. Mead here gives diag- 

 noses of the maladies which affected Job, Saul, Hezekiah, Nebu- 

 chadnezzar, &c. His account of the leprosy of the Jews is ex- 

 ceedingly interesting. He takes his text from Leviticus, chap, 

 xiii. 14, and admires the sanitary regulations laid down by 

 Moses. .He seems to consider that the disease under which 

 Job suffered was Elephantiasis Graecorum. 



THE BLACK DEATH OF A.D. 1348. I cannot here resist giving 

 a short account of this terrible disease, which, like the leprosy, 

 has now happily ceased to exist in England. When examining 

 the monuments in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, I found 

 in the south cloister, on the large tombstone of Abbas Du Blois 

 who died A.D. 1100, the following inscription, which has 

 been cut in since my father's reign as dean. Dr. Stanley has 

 caused to be recorded that, under this very stone lie the 

 remains of " twenty-six monks of Westminster, who died of the 

 black death in 1348." Being desirous of knowing something 

 about the " black death," I consulted my learned friend, Signor 

 Valetta, who writes me : " The black death of 1348 must have 

 been the same which, coming from Asia, ravaged Italy, killed 

 the famous Laura of Petrarch, and was the theme of the famous 

 Decameron of Boccaccio, that is to say, of the ' one hundred 

 novels ' told in ten days by a party of ladies and gentlemen in a 



