tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">49 bears, by Robert de Roos, “pro salute animae meae et omnium antecessorum et successorum meorum,” was endowed for other thirteen.

I may here take the opportunity of stating that the labours of different English antiquaries, and more particularly the investigations of Leland, Dugdale, and Tanner, into the Monastic History of England, tend to show that at an early period many leper-houses were scattered over England and Wales. In searching through the works of these authors, and more particularly through the late splendid edition of the Monasticon Anglicanum, with the numerous additions of Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, I have found references to between eighty and ninety English lazar-houses.50

In the second and third volumes of the Monasticon Anglicanum (1st edition) above ninety51 charters or other notices of English hospitals are published, and of these twenty-one at least were hospitals for the reception of lepers. Bloomefield52 mentions eighteen leper-houses in Norfolk alone; and Taylor,53 in his Index Monasticus, enumerates twenty in that single county. Six of these were placed in Norwich or its immediate vicinity, and five at Lynne Regis.

Objects, Character, and Government of the Leper Hospitals.

The leper hospitals, both in Scotland and elsewhere, were intended merely as receptacles to seclude the infected, not as houses in which a cure of them was to be attempted. They were charitable and hygienic rather than medical institutions.

At the present day tubercular leprosy is still regarded as a disease which sets at defiance all the powers of the medical art. Our ancestors had so firm a belief in the same doctrine, that, in the case of one of the unfortunate wretches who was tried in Edinburgh in 1597 for witchcraft, amongst the gravest of the accusations brought against the panel was this, that she (Christian Livingstone) “affirmit that she culd haill (cure) leprosie, quhilk (the libel adds) the maist expert men in medicine are not abil to do.” Some of the means of cure she had employed have never, I am afraid, been allowed a place in any of our pharmacopœias. I may allude, therefore, as a specimen to one of them amongst others—viz. (and I quote the words of the libel) “she took a reid cock, slew it, baked a bannock (cake) with the blude of it, and gaf (gave) the samyn to the Leper to eat.”54

I leave it to the dogmatism of the pharmacologists to decide whether more potent virtues should be ascribed to this recipe of Christian Livingstone’s or to that deliberately offered with the same purport by our celebrated countryman Michael Scott. “It ought to be known” (says the great Fifeshire philosopher) “that the blood of dogs and of infants two years old or under, when diffused through a bath of heated water, dispels the Leprosy without a doubt” (absque dubio liberat Lepram).55

The miraculous properties of the relics of saints were in some instances strongly relied upon as an article of the Materia Medica, fit among other things to cure this incurable malady. Fosbroke56 mentions a fountain near Moissac, described by Peyrat (abbot of that place, in the fourteenth century), the waters of which were so medicated by the relics of a saint contained in the neighbouring abbey that the crowds of lepers who resorted to it bathed and were immediately cured. But the valued fountain was not sufficiently powerful to avert the disease being communicated to the monks, or to save them even when once they were contaminated; and at last, according to the confessions of the abbot, it was shut up in consequence of some of the order dying of the very malady which their famed waters could infallibly remove.

In the sequel, when considering the causes of the disease, and the regulations of medical police, adopted in regard to the infected, I shall have occasion to speak at length of the strict rules to which the inmates of most of the leper-hospitals were subjected—not for the sake of medical treatment, but with the purpose only of preventing the dissemination of the malady.

Besides being places for the isolation of the infected, the leper-hospitals of Scotland and England were often, like the corresponding institutions of the continent of Europe, founded and endowed as religious establishments; and, as such, they were generally submitted to the sway of some neighbouring abbey or monastery. Semler57 quotes, indeed, a Papal bull, appointing every leper-house to be provided with its own churchyard,58 chapel, and ecclesiastics—(cum cimiterio ecclesiam construere, et proprio gaudere presbyterio)—an order against the latter part of which the poverty of many of the hospitals in Great Britain formed a very secure guarantee. The Greenside Hospital in Edinburgh, being founded at a very late period, partook, perhaps, less of the character of a religious establishment than most others in the kingdom.

The rules established for the domestic and religious duties of the inmates belonging to it, by the commissioners appointed by the magistrates of the city, were few and simple, viz.—

“That the said persons, and ilk ane (every one) of thame leif (live) quetlie, and gif (give) na sclander, be banning, sweyring, flyting, skalding, filthie speaking, or vitious leving, or any oyder way, under the paynes to be enjoynit by the counsall.

“That thair be appoyntit ane ordinair reider to reid the prayeris evrie Sabboth to the said lepperis, and are commodious place appoyntit to the said reider for that effect.”59

Over some of our Scotch lazar-houses, chaplains, and religious officers with the high-church title of priors, were placed.

The prior of Rothfan Hospital was, at the intercession of the founder of the house, admitted to the church. There was one chaplain under him.

In the records of the burgh of Prestwick there is an incidental entry, showing that there was a prior placed over the Kingcase Hospital near