← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:01]
A
Hey. This is U.S. olympic gold medalist Tara Davis Woodhull. And I'm U.S. paralympic gold medalist Hunter Woodhull. As athletes, our lives are about having a clear path and a team that you can absolutely trust. So when it came to getting the best mortgage, we chose PennyMac. PennyMac is proud to be the official mortgage provider of Team USA and you.
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Learn more at pennymac.com PennyMac Loan Services, LLC equal housing lender NMLS ID35953 licensed by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the California Residential Mortgage Lending Act. Conditions and restrictions may apply. England 1247. The gate slams shut behind you, its echo swallowed by the hush of the colony. Smoke drifts from low thatched roofs, mingling with the sharp scent of herbs. Nothing like the rot you were taught to fear. Figures move in quiet rhythms. Bandaged hands tending fires, murmuring prayers. A world far more orderly, more human than legend allows. In a world gripped by fear, few horrors loomed larger than medieval leprosy. We think we know the story. The bells, the rags, the outcasts fading into shadow. But what if everything you imagine is wrong? This episode rips open the gates of the medieval leper colony to reveal what life was really like inside. Its rules, its rituals, its unexpected communities. We'll unmask the Victorian myths that twisted the truth, confront the legend of the leper king, and ask the question no one could a squirrel truly spread the scourge?
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A
So, Anthony P. Delaney.
- [02:11]
B
Yes.
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A
Leprosy. Leprosy, no. I feel like I have a lot of preconceptions about this topic and I suspect some of them are mythological, slash made up by later centuries.
- [02:28]
B
Yeah, the Victorians, they have a lot to answer for, a lot, don't they? I mean, I heard Kate Lister recently say her PhD was more or less on how Victorians came in and ruined all of the thing. And this is another example of that. Okay, so, yeah, leprosy, it's one of those diseases that people are very familiar with. I mean, if you think about it, I just recently went to a Catholic. Catholic school. You spend an awful lot of time talking about leprosy in private.
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A
It's all across the Bible.
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B
It's all across the Bible, but it even predates the Bible, obviously.
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A
Yeah, of course.
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B
But what we have is this very Victorian myth of what it meant to be be leprous, what it meant to be contagious as a leper, what it meant to be, what levels of danger were common. It's all mistaken, of course, because this wasn't exactly. We get we get to the kind of scientific understanding of leprosy in 1873. So anything prior to that, we're all just guessing. The other thing I would caveat here in terms of this discussion is that what you will find is we think that leprosy mutated over the course of the history that we'll be talking about, so that sometimes a description of leprosy in, say, 2000 BCE and it goes back that far might differ from how we would interpret later descriptions.
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A
So the disease itself has changed, we think.
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B
It's hard to know. It's so old and so ancient that it just seems through description that it has had a. But also then there's overlapping things where we believe that there's been other contagious diseases or other types of illness that has been confused for leprosy. So, for instance, syphilis is one of those where actually now we think that certain things depicted or talked about as leprosy were probably tertiary syphilis.
- [04:13]
A
Oh, that's so interesting.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So it's actually quite confusing. There's a lot of gray area, but it is. It is a really ancient old disease, one of the oldest, shaped very much by colonial fear about lack of understanding about bacteria. And it is something that has, you know, from our school days has stuck with us. And the history is actually far more nuanced than we are led to believe, I think.
- [04:38]
A
Yeah. So the version that I think is sort of handed down to us is, you know, leprosy is associated, or was in the past with sort of moral failure in some way. Shame, otherness, people being removed from society and put on its outskirts and a kind of stigma attached to them that they were deadly contagious, therefore a danger to everyone. They had to be removed from polite society and couldn't participate in life. I feel like you're going to challenge a lot of those ideas, though. So tell me a little bit about. Obviously, it's a very, very old disease. It shape shifts. We can't be sure that people in the past are talking about the same disease that now still exists in the.
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B
World, let's say all the time.
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A
But give me a sort of broad history of leprosy, if one can do such a thing.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think we can. It's tricky and we need to have all those caveats I said about other diseases and all that, but I think we can kind of do a skip through. So we have a Sanskrit text from 600 BCE in India which is showing what we think we understand to be a leprous condition. But we also have skeletal remains from 2000 BCE which shows that there is some form of skeletal decay which we would associate again in India, which we would associate with leprosy as well. So it really has this very, very ancient.
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A
And we have sort of history, cultural evidence and archaeological evidence for this.
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B
Yeah. And the archaeological evidence, as I say, is even older than the cultural evidence.
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A
And it is undeniable.
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B
This is gonna feel like a really, really hard pivot, but I'm going to do this because when I was in. And then I'll come to the history and I'm gonna do an anecdote first and then I'll come to the history. When I was in primary school, I was. Everyone goes, how is this gonna go back to this? When I was in primary school, I was obsessed with the hymns at the back of my religious book. Right. My religion. So I would sit on Saturday mornings on the windowsill in my musical theater.
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A
Kid.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, wait and hear the song. Oh, God. I'd sit in the window with my feet on the table, my bum on the windowsill, and I would go to the back of my religious studies book thing, and I would sing from the back of the thing.
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A
Are you gonna sing for a snap?
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B
I am gonna sing the song because this was a song about lepers.
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A
Okay, Please.
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B
I can't remember any of the verses. Okay. But let me give you the chorus. And this sticks with me so much. And, like, I hope other people have learned this song too. If you went to my primary school, you definitely did. Okay. It goes like this. I'm not gonna look at you when I think this because it's too weird. It goes, ring your bell, O you lonely, lonely leper Cry unclean as you wander all around Stay away in your cave up on the hillside Amos the leper, you're banished from this town. It's a jaunty old ditty, isn't it?
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A
Wow. I mean, that's pretty bleak.
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B
Now, let me caveat. So the verses, beautifully sung, but pretty bleak. That usually costs more. The verses were about healing him and about helping him. I can't remember those. All I can remember is.
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A
Oh, you can just remember the one. The vile like you ostracized gap.
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B
But this does have a biblical origin, so it would make sense that I'm learning about that in religious class because it refers to biblical. Leprosy refers to various skin diseases. This is where this idea of, like, is it syphilis? Is it something else? Is leprosy sometimes. But, like.
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A
So maybe this idea of sort of visible difference on the body.
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B
Yes.
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A
And then it being linked to being unclean in some way.
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B
Absolutely, that. And if you think about those words, cry unclean again, I know it's a child song, but cry unclean as you wander all around. But it's giving you links to some of that historical. And there is an idea that it's unclean. It was linked to the law of Moses, which is priests had the ability to diagnose and declare unclean, and therein.
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A
Lies centuries of problems.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not a doctor, that's absolutely fine. But you just say that these people. But then, of course, as I already mentioned, Jesus is healing the lepers and he's showing care and compassion. And then this is how this starts to make its way into the ways in which we're treating them. However, Jesus restores them to society because it's a miraculous event since they've been cured. But that's not what's happening in the leopard.
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A
So they kind of serve, I suppose, a dual function of being something other, something against which clean, quote unquote, clean, morally superior society can operate. These are people who are morally defective in some way or unclean or, you know, again, they've been othered, they've been ostracized. But then also this idea that in helping them in their own suffering, but also in sort of acting like Jesus, you are going to be able to access heaven and godliness.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And also that we have been. Because they're not sure where this is coming from, where this disease is coming from, really. They're slightly filling in the gaps. But what they do know is that Jesus takes care of them, so we should take care of them, but we need to take them out of society in order to do that.
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A
So in terms of the medieval leper, then you talk about them being ostracized. Were there ways of marking them as different? Were they to move through the street, for example, would you recognize someone if the disease was early enough that that wasn't immediately obvious?
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B
Yes. And the thing about that is not everybody was able to get into these hospitals. Right. So some people were in the streets and so they had to dress a certain way, certain colours, certain types of clothing, so you were instantly recognized.
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A
And that was assigned to them.
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B
That was assigned to them, yeah.
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A
Okay.
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B
And then you would have either a clapper or a bell. So again, that bloody song from Prime School ring your bell. Oh, you lonely, lonely leper. This idea of loneliness as well. Right. So it is this Idea that these people are wandering ghost, like on the margins of society, that they have to.
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A
Ring their own bell, they have to ostracize themselves.
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B
I'm coming. I need your. It was twofold, the bell ringing. It was. I need help, I need alms, I need charity. But also, I'm coming.
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A
Yeah. Don't come near me.
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B
Don't come too close to me. Yeah. So it's quite a tragic figure, isn't it, when you think about it.
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A
It is.
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B
The depictions in medieval texts are very, very clear in terms of what they're trying to say. So I have an image here of Job on the dunghill, is afflicted with leprosy to the dismay of his friends and the devil. It's a snappy title, Maddy Pelly. And just have a describe of this for us.
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A
Have a little describe so you can.
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B
See what's going on here.
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A
Okay, so we're looking at a medieval illuminated manuscript. There is text in Latin across the top and a very ornate sort of column to one side. But in the central sort of frame there is Job, you say.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Who is a man with a beard. Yeah, weren't they all? And he's got a lovely kind of green toga thing going on. He is covered in the marks of leprosy. They're very neatly done. There's sort of repetitive pattern over his body. There's not much sort of focus on the gore of the disease so much as the sort of aesthetic of it. Very much in keeping with illuminated manuscript tradition of kind of patterns and that kind of thing. But nevertheless, it's pretty striking. He sat on the dunghill, he is scraping himself with some kind of strigil or similar tool, obviously, kind of, I don't know, scraping the pustules or the open sores off his body. And there is. Yeah, there's blood running down his shin and he looks absolutely miserable. And then to the side of him is presumably the devil, who is a kind of hairy, with claws that are sort of reaching out over Job's shoulder and neck. And the devil, rather fantastically, has red fire coming out of his mouth, his ears and his anus.
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B
His actual arsehole.
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A
Yes, that or he's on his period, I can't tell.
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B
Yeah, look, that could well be it.
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A
Yeah.
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B
A very nice column that's there beside Job, actually. Isn't that nicely decorated?
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A
Yes.
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B
Nothing has to do with leprosy, but there you go.
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A
You can appreciate a good column.
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B
I can at all times. Isn't it interesting as well that he's on A dunghill in terms of that idea of being unclean.
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A
Being unclean, being ostracized. Yeah, all of that. Yeah. I mean, it's a pretty sorrowful image, really.
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B
Yeah, absolutely.
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A
It's sympathetic.
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B
Yes, it is. There's pity in it, isn't there? It's not necessarily so much judgment, but it does feel like the devil's literally on his back. He's having to bear the horrendousness of this disease in his lifetime. That scraping, as you described it, it gives an idea of his frustration.
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A
He's bent over himself. The weight of the disease is too much for him. You know, he's sort of. He's drawn into himself and broken by it.
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B
Yeah, yeah. No, it is. I think there is pity in this as well as some shame at the same time. So it's a real interesting thing. But this also sums up what was happening in leper hospitals, what was being communicated to wider society about leprosy at this time. So, as I say, they were called leprosaria, which are early leper houses. Sometimes you'd hear them called leper hospitals, lazar houses, leper colonies. And we're talking here from the 11th to the 16th century, which is why we're saying the medieval period particularly, and as I say, this was seen as a Christian duty because of their presence in the Bible.
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B
There is then something that happens in the 14th century where we get the Black Death in 1348 and this idea of contagion starts to infiltrate and that, you know, communities, societies can be wiped out and this can be quite devastating and linked start to be made with what people understood or what we now understand to be leprosy and the Black Death, they're not contained. It's a different form of contagion. But this is where this idea of isolation comes from.
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A
Okay, interesting. So there's the devastation of the Black Death basically makes everyone rethink proximity to lepers and there's a move to isolate them further.
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B
Yes. So what you'll often find is on the outskirts of city walls, but depending on the size of the city, that might be a lot of people that are then confined there. So then we start to get this idea of people being taken further away but within some form of dwelling or almost monastic type dwelling.
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A
There's a really great Time Team episode from the 90s. I've been doing a rewatch lately of Time Team. Gorgeously nostalgic, like really worth it. So much amazing archaeology. But there's one where they excavate a leper hospital. And I think from memory they're excavating the skeleton of a young woman who was in that community and trying to piece together something of her life. How she ended up there, how far gone with the disease she was, what it affect it had on her physiologically. Really interesting. But again, I think that was. I think it's somewhere in like Devon or Cornwall where they, where they dig that. But it's a space that is on the outskirts of a settlement. It's very much separate.
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B
But it's. You know, often when we talk about these diseases or this ostracization, it's not something that everybody sees that they have a duty to do. But again, this idea of Christianized, the Christianized west does think it has a responsibility. People are leaving money to these leper hospitals or these leprosarias in their wills. There is an idea that there's arms to be given, that there is something you can do to help these people. But one of the things that I think is really interesting is that after this 14th century innovation, people who don't have leprosy but might be on the margins of society are trying to get into the leper houses because they have such a good reputation for how clean it is.
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A
Because it's a welfare system.
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B
Exactly, exactly. So I think that gives us an insight into maybe the conditions that they're experiencing once they get into these hospitals.
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A
Yeah. And that people are willing to risk contagion potentially in order to have what they see as a. A better opportunity to live.
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B
Yeah. And it's, you know, we talk about the idea of this contagion. Right. And how people are getting it and they don't know, they think it's spread. Similarly, in terms of touch, they think that, oh, you can touch somebody and you're going to get it. Similar to a kind of a Black Death type situation. But it's not that at all. It's. It's prolonged exposure and it's droplets in the respiratory system. That's what's going to give you. So you're not. If you encounter a leper, chances are you're not going to.
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A
You're not necessarily.
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B
Yeah. In medieval England, you're not going to catch leprosy. But this confusion over the way things are spread is interesting, isn't it? Because, like, even in 2010, I think it was, there was this idea that red squirrels were carrying the bacteria. Yes. That caused leprosy, which is a Mycobacterium leprae. So this is what is causing it. And it was referred to as a historical reservoir because it is the exact strain they believe that was around in medieval England.
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A
I love when science and history comes together, but I mean, realistically, how many people are coming into contact with red squirrels?
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B
Yeah. It's not spreading in the uk, we didn't see a cross contamination there. They were worried about it for a while.
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A
Are there cross contaminations elsewhere with animals and humans in terms of leprosy?
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B
Armadillos in the us so it can. I think it's armadillos. Yes.
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A
Again, how much contact are people having with armadillos?
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B
I don't know, but it's there.
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A
Write in and tell us if you.
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B
Live with several armadillos, gut leprosy through armadillos. But here's what we know. Right. This is coming from our point of view. Most people have a natural immunity to that bacteria. Yep. So you will encounter it.
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A
I mean, that's fascinating in and of itself.
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B
Yeah, Right, like. And of course, they wouldn't have known anything about immunology at this period in medieval Europe. Transmission, as I said, needs to be long term. It needs to be close and sustained contact. If you think about Princess Diana, she, as well as sitting with AIDS patients, she also visited patients with what was then in the medieval period called leprosy. And she was touching them, she was with them. And the medical professionals will have known that there was no real chance of contagion there. But to the press and to the.
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A
World, it was revolutionary.
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B
They still have this idea of the Victorian, you know, way. It's. It's.
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A
Yeah, that's so interesting.
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B
It damages the nerve. So often what people will experience is a loss of feeling in their fingers or in their hands to begin with, then maybe in their lips, and then it's a nervous system, it attacks the nervous system. So pain starts after the numbing pain starts to come in in different areas and then you will get different variations where different types of sores will appear on the body or where layers of skin start to look quite hard and it can be quite disfiguring as well. So.
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A
And is it eventually readable on the skeleton?
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B
Yes, yes. Yeah. And that's how they found in terms of Indian 2000 BCK. So, yeah, it can be. But now. But it is completely curable now. And I've read cases, when I was preparing for this, of people even in the United States who were being treated for up to like, three years. So even though it's treatable now and it's totally curable, people still suffer with it, and it's still something that they live with and have to cope with. The skin can discolor sometimes it can, you know, and all this thing can be reversed, but it is still a painful and quite upsetting situation for people.
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A
To find themselves, especially because in the modern world we still live with those sort of preconceptions and misinformed ideas, largely from the Victorians, about what this is. So I imagine it's a difficult disease to have even in the modern day. In terms of that. Going back to the medieval leper colony, though, and I think the term leper colony is interesting because it sort of suggests a community that's. That's built up out of choice, not out of necessity, which I think is, you know, even that is sort of misinforming us slightly in terms of how these communities come together. Do we know of any specific ones and who might be in them and how many people, for example?
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B
Yeah, so we have St. James the less. And this is more or less at the site of modern day St James in London.
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A
Okay.
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B
It was a hospital for leprous women, as they were referred to in contemporary Parlance, founded in 1189, but it was still there in. At the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry the 8th took it over and that's when, not the same building, it was changed, but that's when it started to become part of the royal remit. It eventually was 160 acres, but it was following this again, this Augustinian way of life from the 12th century, this monastic idea. It wasn't a bad place to be necessarily. It wasn't that removed from society. And St. James at this point was very nice and green and, you know, again, talking about those places that people wanted to be. And this is a daily routine from about 1250. And this is when St. James the less was probably at its most functional in terms of its leper functionality. You would be woken by a bell for matins, which are your morning prayers.
- [23:53]
A
If you are, again, very monastical.
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B
Very monastical. And you'll see this throughout. Then there would be the washing of sores and that was. They would be doing that themselves, but the staff would not necessarily oversee, but they would encourage that. So that, you know, cleanliness was seen as a thing.
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A
Yeah, and an active treatment.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. Then we go to breakfast, which was a mixture of pottage or muslin bread, rye bread, weak ale. Then you're moving into the breakfast hall. But you're also listening to devotional texts in the late morning. And see, like, this is. This is really quite caring in many ways. For the medieval period, you would have a visit, a visiting medical practitioner. He would come with ointments, herbs and goose grease. Now, look, I'm not saying that it's going to do anything.
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A
It's not going to help necessarily, but.
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B
The intention is interesting, even despite the fact that we've moved these people.
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A
And you can see why people would want to get into these institutions.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And also that, okay, it might not be curing anything, but you can imagine there's an element of relief in some of these things to, like, you know, hydrate some of these sores that are happening. Low effort work, if you could, was encouraged. Again, think about that monastic idea of busying oneself and having that godly work around, mending clothes, tending to the garden. Then it would be time for lunch. You'd have pottage, charitable donations of food, meat and cheese on feast days.
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A
I mean, this is for the medieval world. This is quite Good.
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B
One thing which I want to bear in mind here as well, is that this wasn't a poor person's disease, so you could actually get leprosy. I mean, we have examples of kings contracting leprosy. So we. We know. Not in England, but we know that this was potentially quite a melting pot of people that are in here. And so for some people, they are used to this type of food. So it's, you know, it's.
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A
So that's why the standard is so high.
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B
We're still doing that and they're still experiencing that. It's probably a little lower than some of them are. You know, there's not as much meat, maybe, as they might be used to, but it is still. There's a level of decorum and decency that's being. So you have this real oppositional thing of going, take them away from us. But at the same time, let's make sure we're being charitable.
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A
Yeah, It's. It's almost like these people need to be separated, but they need to be treated well.
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B
You know, the worthy poor that we get in the Victorian era. There's an element of that.
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A
Well, you can see why this has attracted the Victorians. Okay, so you've had your. Your pottage for lunch, or your. Your meat and cheese. What's next?
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B
So then basically, you just keep pootling around for the afternoon and you do loads of praying and then you go to bed. That kind of is what it does. You see what. In terms of, like, the monastic idea, this is very much there. It's writ large, it is contemplative, it is routined, and it is relatively comfortable.
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A
You mentioned that some kings had leprosy. Tell me about a particular case.
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B
So this is Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, whom we all know and love. Of course, I have a famous Baldwin, very well aware of. Of Baldwin of Jerusalem. He became King at 13 in 1174.
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A
Now, is he the one who's depicted in that really bad Orlando Bloom film, Kingdom of Heaven?
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B
He is. I haven't seen it, though.
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A
Don't bother.
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B
Okay.
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A
Of its time. Early 2000s, I think.
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B
Right.
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A
Not good.
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B
God, where is time going? Early 2000s. Right. See, that's.
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A
That's yesterday. Sure. Yeah, yeah.
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B
He was diagnosed as a child and his symptoms, of course, got worse as he aged. They do progressively get worse. That's how this works.
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A
And to have contracted it as a child, you know, that's a lifetime of suffering.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That you're stuck with.
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B
I will say, as well, one thing to bear in mind is that you could be a convector. Is that the right word of leprosy? So you could be harboring it, but have no symptoms yourself and going about your business and spreading it. Yeah.
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A
Like Typhoid Mary.
- [27:50]
B
Very like that. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a previous episode. Yeah. Go back and listen to her. So physicians noticed initially that he felt no pain when he was pinched. So, remember I said about the numbness.
- [28:00]
A
Yeah. The areas.
- [28:01]
B
That's where the nerves are coming in. But he, you know, was still very effective as a leader, despite his age and his illness. He reigned over civil wars, a war with Saladin, who was a sultan in Egypt, and he was still quite savvy politically and militarily. And so he gained an awful lot of respect. And so, again, it's interesting to see that he's not ostracized in the same way he's not removed.
- [28:24]
A
I wonder if there's something about sort of the mystery around the body of the king, then that distance and that the suffering becomes sort of part of the royal mystique in a way.
- [28:35]
B
Yeah. And what does that mean? Cause the royal, as you say, like the body politic, the royal body is so important in all depictions of all types of kingship and queenship, even still to this day. But what we have with Baldwin is the fact that his hands are disfiguring. And, you know, his. By 1183, he can't walk unaided, for instance, and then eventually he can't use his hands at all because of how disfigured they are. He becomes blind. That's another. This is one of the painful things. When I read accounts of it from this time or from the 15th, 16th, 17th century, the eyes start to really suffer. They become so sore, so painful, so scratchy, like you can imagine how it might.
- [29:16]
A
Am I right in thinking you can't. You can't blink? After a while, you lose the ability to blink.
- [29:21]
B
Yes. And the. Which is so grim, sometimes the eyelids can turn in a little bit as well. It's just. Can you imagine the pain and the discomfort of that?
- [29:29]
A
It's so terrible.
- [29:30]
B
I mean, that's just. Especially if you're like, 13, whatever, you know, if you're essentially a kid. Well, he's a bit older at this point, but Anyway, he. In 1184, he developed a fever, and by 1185, he was dead. So, you know, it was. Well, it was swift, but it's not swift if you're suffering from that from.
- [29:48]
A
Many, many years, you know. Yeah, but he does die young man.
- [29:51]
B
Yeah, he does. And I will say one of the things to bear in mind is it's very rare that you die from leprosy because what you will do is you will die from something, an illness associated with the leprosy. So for instance, you, your system will start to shut down because you are too dehydrated, because you can't eat, cause you can't use the muscles in your mouth or whatever it might be. So it's usually a knock on effect that will eventually kill you. But it's pretty grim.
- [30:16]
A
And I wonder if he's remembered in terms of just thinking about his legacy. If he's remembered because he had the disease, because he's remembered as quite an effective leader and if the disease is part of his sort of Persona, his perceived ability to suffer and still be in power and still look after his people. I wonder if that's, if his kingship and the leprosy are intertwined in that way.
- [30:41]
B
I think so. And I think that's really interesting in terms of this idea of Christianity and suffering. Think about hair shirts and self flagellation and you know, in our depiction that you described earlier, there was this scraping, this bloodletting and doing it to oneself.
- [30:57]
A
The sort of purification of one's own body.
- [31:00]
B
And so you get this kind of idea that that could be happening. One of the things which I think is really interesting if we just push forward a little bit because we still have leprosy today. But there is a point in around the 16th, 17th century where cases start to drop and it starts to overlap with the emergence of tb. And so what people think is that it starts to potentially morph, but probably not, but that TB becomes a related bacterial infection that then overtakes in the Western world, leprosy. But leprosy is still very much with us, very, very much.
- [31:38]
A
It certainly overtakes culturally, you know, thinking about TB and its kind of pervasiveness, particularly by the Victorian era.
- [31:44]
B
Yes.
- [31:45]
A
And that's every one with a little chill or coughing into a handkerchief has got tb.
- [31:49]
B
And I mean, I think what we ascribe the spread of leprosy initially to the spread of the Roman Empire as well. So it's coming from the east to the west, slow, slowly over, you know, a few hundred years. But then it also starts to have devastating effects on indigenous populations in the Americas, for instance, where Western cultures are bringing that there and then infecting, you know, and that's only one amongst many things that they're infecting. But it's a very interesting thing because almost certainly back in my day anyway, every child a primary school learns something about leprosy. Not necessarily historically accurate, but something cultural, something religious, often about leprosy. But it is, yes, a devastating disease, but it's also something that is infused with this idea, as I say, of, of charitable giving and of it, for me, it seems the tensions are really rife because all of that that I just described and then saying, yeah, but put them over there.
- [32:51]
A
Yeah, it's hard to marry those two up, I think even within the ideas of Christianity that we've discussed. Tell me this, when in medical practice did a cure come into play?
- [33:04]
B
It kind of came with the identification of the bacterium. So that's 1873 and the bacterium, you.
- [33:11]
A
Surprised me that it's. That it is in the 19th century, actually. That's interesting.
- [33:15]
B
Yeah, yeah, it is in the 19th century. Although I suppose, you know, 40 years into odd, 30 odd years into Victoria's reign. So there's plenty of time for them to build up this mythological thing over it. And also like, even though they know that, even though we know that scientifically, we still stuck with an awful lot of the myths, you know, they' with us for so long that they endure. But in 1873 we have the discovery of the Mycobacterium leprae, which is the cause of leprosy. And that was the first time a bacterium was proven to cause human disease. And it feels really fitting that it was this.
- [33:50]
A
Such a disease. Such a disease, right.
- [33:52]
B
And it's like, okay, that's been with us for so long and now finally we have this kind of makeup of it, this, this micro, microbial makeup. And it's, it, yeah, it's. That starts to change things and, but it does take until the 1940s, so it does take until the 20th century for an actual proven cure. Promen that starts to be used in the 1940s. But now, which is the way to treat us starts coming in in the 1980s, 1981. The multi drug therapy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in terms of the real proper way to go about it as we do it now, and despite the fact that, that we have these MDT treatments or we have, you know, the microbial makeup now, or we understand those things, there's still probably about 200,000 cases of leprosy each year worldwide. So it's not like this has gone away, it's just treatable now.
- [34:43]
A
It's just treatable. I mean that's really remarkable, isn't it? And it just shows the sort of enduring legacy of that, the enduring, the ongoing history of it as well, and how our perception of it is constantly changing. Thank you for that. That's been a really interesting episode.
- [34:56]
B
It's weird, isn't it? It's a strange little dip into a very bizarre history in many ways, because again, it's one of those things that we just flippantly know a bit about. But actually, once you delve into it, we don't know that much at all.
- [35:10]
A
We realize that we have lots of misconceptions. Actually. If you've enjoyed this episode and you want to hear more medical histories from us, I'd like to do more medical histories. We've died in the Black Deaths.
- [35:20]
B
Oh yeah.
- [35:21]
A
I love that sometimes, but I feel like, I feel like there's more to do.
- [35:23]
B
Helen Carr is on there talking about Black Death, right?
- [35:25]
A
She is fantastic. Helen Carr, Yes.
- [35:26]
B
Loads of pain stuff back there.
- [35:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. But I feel like there's this stuff beyond plague we could be doing. So if you want to hear about that, if you have an idea for a medical episode, you can get in touch@after darkhistoryhit.com.
- [35:45]
F
This is Paige Desorbo from Giggly Squad. Boost Mobile gives you the same network coverage, speed and service you're used to. Just add a more affordable price. Why pay more if you don't have to? Offering reliable nationwide coverage backed by a 30 day money back guarantee. Love your service or get your money back, no questions asked. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or head to boostmobile.com to learn more. After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers who cancel within 30 days of activation will have Boost service fees refunded, activation fees if applicable, and phone payments will not be refunded.