1363

Guy de Chauliac authors first textbook that labels leprosy “contagious and infectious” and includes [corrupt] air and contact, jointly, among its primary causes. It is striking, given the Black Death (1347-1350) that Guy was silent on the need for sequestration of lepers, “while officials who recorded medical interventions,” along with authors of vernacular medicine, “began to link this need with contagiousness before 1347. This linkage apparently emerged in the closing decades of the thirteenth century” (Demaitre, loc 992-94). Official procedures and some vernacular treatises convey “overall impression that they firmly linked infection and sequestration decades before academic authors propounded the connection” (loc 1003-4). From around 1400, the tightening of social structures (via temporal lords) emphasizing “conveyance by air rather than touch” (loc 967-96 8). Sixteenth-century authors “moved farther away from the teachings of Avicenna and Galen . . . by integrating communicability ever more fully into the essence of leprosy” (loc 974). For Paré, “the sweat and vapors that issue from their [lepers’] bodies are poisonous. And so is their breath, and drinking from the cups and other vessels from which they have drunk” (loc 979).