Clappers, colonies and poisoned wells: a surprising history of leprosy

'What strange ideas people have about leprosy, doctor,' a character wonders in Graham Greene's 1960 novel A Burnt-Out Case, set in a Congolese leper colony. 'They learn about it from the Bible, like sex,' the doctor replies wearily. There's a great deal of historical truth in this wry exchange, the journalist Oliver Basciano tells us in this wide-ranging, globetrotting survey of the disease.
Leprosy makes its literary premiere in Leviticus. In the Old Testament, those stricken with tzaraath are unclean and unworthy, deserving of ostracism as well as charity. The coinage lepra — scaly, in the manner of a snake — we owe to the Alexandrian Jewish scribes who translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. But in the New Testament and later in the Middle Ages leprosy was regarded as a divine blessing. Basciano's chapter on medieval leprosy is the most arresting of this book. Living with leprosy was deemed akin to suffering in purgatory. At death, then, the leper could expect an easy passage to Heaven.

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