VOL. XXXI.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 4Q3 



would be cured by the same method ; but their leprosy and ours, being abso- 

 lutely different diseases, we by no means ought to expect the success, from 

 the same process of cure, should be the same. I dare be positive that nobody 

 ever observed our leprosy to be attended with falling of the hair, hoarseness of 

 the voice, the patient speaking as though he spoke through the nose, con- 

 sumption of the flesh, ulcers all over the body, corruption of the fleshy parts, 

 and of the bones themselves, filthy ulcers of the throat, corrosion and falling 

 of the nose, all which are reckoned as symptoms of their leprosy : on the con- 

 trary, ours is a mild and almost inoff^ensive disease, which a person may be 

 afi^ected with during his life, and never become worse; whereas the other, by 

 displaying itself under the symptoms before enumerated, brings the patient to 

 the most miserable end; besides, their disease was got by coition as their 

 authors assure us, but in our leprosy, a diseased husband may cohabit with his 

 wife as long as he lives, and he shall never be able either by coition, or the 

 immediate contact of the diseased parts with those that are sound, to commu- 

 nicate any malady. Had what our predecessors called the leprosy been the 

 same disease we call by that name now, they had not been so solicitous of 

 making such large provision for them, or shutting them up from human society; 

 for one of our leprous persons might have been among them, and nobody have 

 known he laboured under any infirmity at all. 



Hence it is evident that the disease so common among them, was entirely 

 different from our leprosy, the appearances of which bear no manner of ana- 

 logy with the former: it is from the symptoms of the disease, and the manner 

 of its being received, that we generally know one disease from another ; but 

 the symptoms of most of their leprous persons, and the manner in which the 

 disease was received, will be found in no other disease that attacks the human 

 body, but in the venereal disease only : for here they so exactly agree, that we 

 must in a manner do violence to our own reason, if we deny them to be 

 the same. 



The second objection was long ago falsely asserted by Dr. Fuller, the his- 

 torian, that the leprosy was brought into England from the Holy War, by some . 

 of our countrymen, and that the disease was altogether unknown among us 

 before. This, as I take it, does not so immediately concern me, since all I 

 take upon me to prove is, that what they called the leprosy, is not the same 

 disease that we call by that name now, but another. However, I shall in a 

 few words make it appear that this objection is likewise groundless, by ob- 

 serving that the first Englishmen that went over to the Holy War made 

 their first voyage in the year IO96, as our historians generally agree, and that 

 some of them returned in IO98, two years after that expedition. But it is 



