charitable
institutions.

A hospital movement, quite distinct from that of Innocent III., which
attracted so much attention shortly after the general hospital became
common as to deserve particular consideration, was the erection of the
leproseries or special institutions for the care of lepers. Leprosy
had become quite common in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the
continued contact of the West with the East during the crusades had
brought about a notable increase of the disease. It is not definitely
known how much of what was called leprosy at that time, really
belonged to the specific disease now known as lepra. There is no doubt
that many affections, which have since come to be considered as quite
harmless and non-contagious, were included under the designation
leprosy by the populace and even physicians incapable as yet of making
a proper differential diagnosis. Probably severe cases of eczema and
other chronic skin diseases, especially when complicated by the
results of wrongly directed treatment or of lack of cleansing, were
not infrequently pronounced to be true leprosy.

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There is no doubt at all, however, of the occurrence of real leprosy
in many of the towns of the West from the twelfth to the fifteenth
centuries, and the erection of these hospitals proved the best
possible prophylactic against the further spread of the disease.
Leprosy is contagious, but only mildly so. Years of intimate
association with a leper may, and usually do, bring about the
communication of the disease to those around them, especially if they
do not exercise rather carefully, certain precise precautions as to
cleanliness after personal contact or after the handling of things
which have previously been in the leper's possession. As the result of
the existence of these houses of segregation, leprosy disappeared
during the course of the next three centuries, and thus a great
hygienic triumph was obtained by sanitary regulation.

This successful sanitary and hygienic work, which brought about
practically the complete obliteration of leprosy in the Middle Ages,
furnished the first example of the possibility of eradicating a
disease that has once become a serious scourge to mankind. That this
should have been accomplished by a movement that had its greatest
source in the thirteenth century is all the more surprising, since we
are usually accustomed to think of the people of the times as sadly
lacking in any interest in sanita