Excerpt from Prize Essays on Leprosy It was in the eleventh century that the first hospitals and pest houses were built; but we must not necessarily assume that the existence and building of leper houses and like institutions implied a new or even an increasing disease. The leper-house period - roughly from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries inclusive - may have been due to the awakening of. Humanitarian ideas, or to some rough medical or ecclesiastical intention of thereby preventing the spread of the disease. In all probability leprosy was at its zenith not later than the twelfth century, even though many leper-houses date after that. Whether that be the exact period of its zenith, it seems quite clear that leprosy was a pre-norman disease in the British Islands. Some have said the returning Crusaders brought leprosy back to England. This, now, is surely a discarded view. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.