the Greenside Hospital. In his Caledonia,39 the late excellent antiquary and philologist, George Chalmers, expresses his belief in the opinion suggested by the Rev. Mr. White, that the name of the village of Liberton (two miles south of Edinburgh) is merely a corruption of Liper town,—liper being the old Scotch term for leprosy; and, as is well known, the letters p and b being constantly interchanged for one another in the composition and transmutation of words. This idea is certainly in no small degree countenanced by the circumstance that the lands of Upper Liberton (Libertune) in some old writs are described under the name of “terrarum de Spittle town” (Hospital town.)40

Besides, the “Oily or Balm Well of St. Catherine’s at Liberton,” had been long held in high estimation in curing cutaneous diseases, and still maintained great repute as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his brief but interesting Cosmography and Description of Albion, Boece, Canon of Aberdeen, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, states that the oil of this well “valet contra varias cutis scabricies.”—Historiæ Scotorum (1526), p. xi.41

J. Monipennie alleges that its oil or “fatness is of a sudain operation to heal all salt scabs and humors that trouble the outward skin of man.”42 Dr. Hare makes mention of it to the same purpose.43 After the institution of the monastery of St. Catherine of Sienna (Scotticé, Sheens) on the Burrow Moor, at a short distance south of the city walls of Edinburgh, the Dominican nuns belonging to it made, in honour of St. Catherine, an annual solemn procession to the chapel and balm well of Liberton.44

This “oily or balm well” of Liberton was sufficient to excite the admiration and engage the protective care of the credulous King James VI. In a curious monograph45 on the virtues of the well, published at Edinburgh in 1664, the author, “Mathew Mackaile, Chirurgo-Medicine,” indulges himself (p. 117) in the following historical eulogium and anathema in regard to it:—

“His Majesty King James the Sixth, the first monarch of Great Britain, of blessed memory, had such a great estimation of this rare well, that when he returned from England to visit this his ancient kingdom of Scotland in anno 1617, he went in person to see it, and ordered that it should be built with stones from the bottom to the top, and that a door and a pair of stairs should be made for it, that men might have the more easie access unto its bottom for getting of the oyl. This royal command being obeyed, the well was adorned and preserved, until the year 1650, when that execrable regicide and usurper, Oliver Cromwell, with his rebellious and sacrilegious accomplices, did invade this kingdom, and not only deface such rare and ancient monuments of Nature’s handwork, but also the synagogues of the God of nature.”

But it is unnecessary to insist further upon such problematical evidence in regard to the probable extent and prevalence of the disease in Scotland. A proof of this, of a much stronger character, is afforded by the simple fact that, as late as the reign of James I. the victims of the disease were made the subject of a direct and special legislative enactment in the Scottish Parliament held at Perth in the year 1427. I shall quote one short clause from this act “anent Lipper Folke”46 (as it is termed), to illustrate both the apparent prevalence of the malady at that time, and this circumstance, that the burghs of the kingdom are then spoken of as possessing, or obliged to possess, lazar-houses of their own. The second clause is to the following effect: “Item, that na Lipper Folke sit to thig (beg) neither in kirk nor kirkzaird, nor other place within the burrowes, but at their own hospital, and at the port of the towne and other places outwith the burrowes.”

It is impossible to form any approach as to the number affected in this country. The hospitals that I have enumerated do not seem calculated to contain many patients. As we have already seen, that of Ayr contained at least eight patients; Rothfan, seven; five were admitted into the Greenside hospital at its first opening in 1591; and in a report of the Glasgow hospital, submitted to the magistrates in 1589, six lepers were reported as then belonging to that institution. These data are entirely inadequate to draw any conclusion from, and the more so, that here, as in England, the disease was probably more extensively spread during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries than afterwards; and it is exactly at that remote period that all our Scottish records are most defective.

In these early times the very words employed to designate the disease show its extent and severity. Somner, Lye, and Bosworth, in their several Dictionaries of the old Anglo-Saxon language, all quote the remarkable expression, “seo mycle adl,” “the mickle ail” or great disease, as signifying “elephantiasis” or “leprosie;” and it is worthy of observation, in reference to the same point, that the delightful old French chronicler, Sir John Froissart, who visited Scotland in the time of Robert II., applies, as we shall afterwards see, the analogous term of “la grosse maladie” to one noted case of leprosy in this country. Some further idea may be formed of the frequency of the disease, at least in the border counties of Scotland, when I state that, before the year 1200, there existed various hospitals for the exclusive reception of lepers in the immediately adjoining English counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Durham. Three alone of these hospitals contained as many as ninety-one lepers in all—viz. the hospital of Sherburne, near Durham,47 contained sixty-five; St. Nicholas, Carlisle,48 contained thirteen; and Bolton, in Northumberland, founded, as its charter