Th e world of lepers in conditions of marginalization and mercy: habitat, legislation, restrictions and prejudices (historical, sanitary-epidemiological and ethnocultural interferences)

Abstract

In the historical past, lepers were organized into separate communities, living poorly in leprosariums. In society, lepers were treated diff erently, being tolerated and marginalized. Tolerance of lepers included Christian perception and multiple biblical postulates in which the lepers were miraculously healed; Jesus was received in the home of Simeon the Leper. At the same time, people’s fear of leprosy, amplifi ed by the ignorance of the causes of the disease, made lepers undesirable in the medieval society. Multiple restrictions were imposed on lepers; marriages were dissolved when the husband or wife had leprosy. In more serious cases, marked by the phobias of the time, leprosy patients were killed, being blamed for a series of horrors, born more against the background of phobias that dominated the collective imagination of the people. Th e imposed lepers lived in a separate world of their own, a world that existed in the suburbs of the city, a world that lived by its rules and regulations, imposed for the most part from the outside.