472 Philosophical transactions. [anno 1720. 



their astonishment, that in a little time the sores became healed, and the pa- 

 tients cured. And by this accident it was the method of salivating by unction 

 was first discovered, which is in so much use at this day. 



Now although the foreign authorities beforementioned, might be considered 

 as sufficient to prove how our ancestors blended these 2 diseases together; yet 

 I shall prove fi-om our own writers, long before those, that though the pox 

 was, not only among us, but in distant nations, anciently confounded with the 

 leprosy: yet so exact were our writers in their observations of the infectious 

 nature of one species of that disease, and describing the symptoms, as was suf- 

 ficient to lead any person to distinguish between them. I shall therefore first 

 inquire into the manner how the leprosy was sometimes said to be gotten in 

 those early times, and then examine the symptoms of the disease that attacked 

 the patient. 



John Gadisden, a very learned and famous English physician, who flourished 

 about the year 1340, in an excellent work of his, entitled Rosa Anglica, speak- 

 ing de infectione ex coitu leprosi, vel leprosae, says as follows: Primo notandum 

 quod ille qui timet de excoriatione et arsura virgae post coitum, statim lavet 

 virgam cum aqua mixta aceto, vel cum urina propria, et nihil mali habebit; and 

 in another place speaking, de ulcere virgae, he says, sed si quis vult membrum 

 ab omni corruptione servare, cum a muliere recedit, quam forte habet suspectam 

 de immunditie, lavet illud cum aqua frigida mixta cum aceto, vel urina propria, 

 intra vel extra praeputium. Likewise, still speaking of the leprosy, he recom- 

 mends a decoction of plantain and roses in wine, to be used by the woman, 

 immediately after the venereal encounter; by which he says she will be secure. 

 From hence it is evident that some of their leprous women, as they called them, 

 were capable of communicating an infectious malady to those who had carnal 

 conversation with them : which proves, that the pudenda of the women must 

 be diseased : For as much as we are absolutely assured infections of that nature 

 only happen when a sound part comes to an immediate contact with a diseased 

 one; the symptoms always first displaying themselves in those parts through 

 which the virulency is first conveyed. Now in a true leprosy we never meet 

 with the mention of any disorder in those parts, which, if there be not, must 

 absolutely secure the person from having that disease communicated to him by 

 coition with leprous women; but it proves there was a disease among them, 

 which was not the leprosy, though it went by that name; and that this could 

 be no other than venereal, because it was infectious: for there is no other 

 disease that is capable of being communicated this way but the venereal disease, 

 seeing the pudenda are only in that distemper so diseased as to become capable 

 of communicating their contagion. 



