After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Inside A Medieval Leper Colony

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Come back with us to a Medieval leper colony.What was life really like for patients inside the gates? What did it mean when the 'leper bell' rang? And what happened at a 'living funeral'?Join Anthony and Maddy as they separate popular myth from fact, taking you through a typical day inside a leper colony in medieval Europe.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Freddy Chick and researched by Phoebe Joyce.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 expects. Could a squirrel truly spread the scourge? So, Anthony P. Delaney. Yes? Leprosy.

Leprosy. Tell me more. 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. Yeah, the Victorians. They have a lot to answer for a lot, don't they? I mean, I heard Kay Lister recently say her PhD was more or less on how Victorians came in and ruined all of history just through 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 certainly went to a Catholic school. You spend an awful lot of time talking about leprosy in primary school. It's all across the Bible. It's all across the Bible, but it even, you know, predates the Bible, obviously. Yeah, well, of course. But what we have is this very Victorian myth of what it meant to be leprous, what it meant to be contagious as a leper, what it meant to be, what levels of danger were common.

But it's all mistaken, of course, because this wasn't exactly, 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 description of book. So the disease itself has changed. We think it's hard to know. It's so old and so ancient that it just seems through. 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 a 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. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, yeah. So it's actually quite confusing and there's a lot of grey area. But 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 allowed to believe, I think. 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 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, they say it's a very, very old disease.

It shapeshifts. We can't be sure that people in the past are talking about the same disease that now still exists in the world. All the time. Yep, yep. But give me a sort of broad history of leprosy if one can do such a thing. Yeah, I mean, I think we can. It's tricky and we need to have all those caveats they 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 history. And we have sort of cultural evidence and archaeological evidence for this. Yeah, and the archaeological evidence, as I say, is even older than the cultural evidence. And it is undeniable.

This is going to 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 going to do an anecdote first, and then I'll come to the history. When I was in primary school Everyone goes How is this going to go back to this? When I was in primary school I was obsessed with the hymns

at the back of my religious book Right? Of course you are. So I would sit on Saturday mornings On the window sill In my parents' kitchen Such a musical theatre kid Yeah yeah

Well wait and you hear the song 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 You're going to sing for a son

Because this was a song about lepers Okay, please. 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 going to look at you and I think this because it's too weird. It goes, ring your bellow, your lonely, lonely leper. Cry on clean 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? Wow. I mean, that's pretty bleak. Now, let me caveat. So, the verses

I don't remember. 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 go up there with your bell. You can just remember the vile, like, you ostracized get up here. 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 to biblical leprosy refers to various skin disease. This is where this idea of like, is it syphilis, is it something else. Is it leprosy sometimes? So maybe this idea of sort of visible difference on the body.

Yes, and then it's linked to being unclean in somewhere. Absolutely that. And if you think about those words, cry unclean. Again, I know it's a child's 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 as priests had the ability to diagnose and declare

unclean. And they're in life centuries of problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're not a doctor. That's absolutely fine. 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.

Because they've been cured. But that's not what's happening in the leper. So they call them. 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, they've been, again, 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. 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.

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 recognise someone if the disease was early enough that that wasn't immediately obvious? 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 recognisable.

And that was assigned to them. That was assigned to them, yeah. Okay. And then you would have either a clapper or a bell. So again, that bloody song from Prime School, ring your bell, oh, your 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. And they have to ring their own bell.

They have to ostracise themselves as well. I'm coming. I need your... It was twofold, the bell ringing. It was, I need help. I need arms. I need charity. But also I'm coming.

Yeah. Don't come near me. Don't come too close to me. Yeah. So it's quite a tragic figure, isn't it, when you think about it? It is. The depictions are... in medieval texts are 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, Maddie Pell. And just have a describe of this for us. Have a little describe. You can see what's going on here. Okay, so we're looking at a medieval illuminated manuscript. There is text in Latin across the top

and a very ornate column to one side. But in the central sort of frame, there is Job, you see, say, who is a man with a beard. Weren't they all? 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 stridgel or similar tool. Obviously kind of, I don't know, scraping the postules or the open sores off his body. And there is blood pouring out. 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 creature 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. His actual arsehole. Yes. That or he's on his period. I can't tell. Yeah, look, that could well be it.

Yeah. A very nice column that's there beside Job actually. Isn't that nicely decorated? Yes, very nice. But there you go. Can appreciate a good column? 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?

Being unclean, being ostracized, yeah, all of that. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a pretty sorrowful image, really. Yeah, absolutely. It's sympathetic. Yes, it is. There's pity in it, isn't there? It's not necessarily so much judgment. But it does feel like, you know, the devil's literally on his back.

He's having to bear the horrendousness of this disease in his lifetime. And that's scraping, as you described, like it gives an idea of his frustration. He's bent over himself, like 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. it. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, it is, I think there is pity in this as well as some shame at the same time. So it's, 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 call 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. particularly. And as I say, this was seen as a Christian duty because of their presence in the Bible. 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 links 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. 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. Yes. So what you'll often find is on the outskirts of city walls. Yeah. But depending on the size of the city, that might be a lot of people that are, 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. There's a really great

Time Team episode from the 90s. I've been doing a re-watch lately of Time Team. Gorgeously and 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 affected, had on her physiologically. Really interesting. But again, I think that was, I think it's somewhere in like Devon or Cormor where they dig that. But it's a space that is on the outskirts of a settlement. It's very much separate. 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 leprosarios 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 in there. Because it's a welfare system in a way.

Exactly. So I think that gives us an insight into maybe the conditions that they're experiencing once they get into these hospitals. Yeah, and that people are willing to risk contagion, potentially, in order to have what they see as a better opportunity to live. 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 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. You're not necessarily 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 this idea that red squirrels were carrying the bacteria. Yes, that caused leprosy, which is a mycobacterium lepray. So this is the 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. Oh, I love when science and history comes together.

That's really weird, right? But, I mean, realistically, how many people are coming into contact? Red Squirrels. Yeah, it's not spreading. In the UK, we didn't see a cross-contamination there. They were worried about it for a while. Are there cross-contamination elsewhere with animals and humans in terms of lepros? Armadillos in the US. So it can. I think it's Aramorillos, yes. Again, how much contact are people having with armadillos? I don't know, but it's there. Right in and tell us if you live with several armadillos. Got 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. Yeah. So you will... I mean, that's fascinating in and of itself. Yeah, right? 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 world, they still have this idea of the Victorian way it's spread. Yeah, that's so interesting. It damages the nerves, 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 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. And is it eventually readable on the skeleton? Yes, yes, yeah.

And that's how they found in terms of Indian 2000 BC. So yeah, it can be. 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 that the skin can discolour sometimes. It can, you know, and all this thing can be reversed, but it is still a painful and quite upsetting situation for people 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 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?

Yeah, so we have St. James the less and this is more or less at the site of modern day St. James in London. It was a hospital for lepros women, as they were referred to in contemporary parlance, founded in 1189, but it was still there at the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII took it over and that's not the same building. It was changed, but That's when it started to become part of the royal remit. Okay. 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 from Matins, which are your mourning prayers if you were healthy enough. Very monastical. And you'll see this throughout.

Then there would be the washing of sores. And they would be doing that themselves, but the staff would not necessarily oversee, but they would encourage that. Okay. You know, cleanliness was seen as a thing. Yeah, and an active treatment. Yeah, absolutely. then we go to breakfast, which was a mixture of potage or Maslin 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 really quite caring in many ways for the medieval period. You would have 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. It's not going to help necessarily. No. But the intention is interesting. Even despite the fact that we've moved these people.

And you can see why people would want to get into these institutions. 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, and, and, you know, 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. I mean, for the medieval world, this is quite good. 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 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...

So that's why the standard is so high. 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 big. 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.

Yeah. It's almost seems like a worthy. These people need to be separated, but they need to be treated well. You know, the worthy, poor that we get in the Victorian era. There's an element of that queen here. Well, you can see why this has attracted the Victorians.

Okay, so you've had your potage for lunch or your meat and cheese. What's next? 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. Okay.

You see what the, in terms of, of like the monastic idea. This is very much there. It's writ large. It is contemplative. It is routine. Yeah. And it is relatively comfortable.

You mentioned that some kings had leprosy. Tell me about a particular case. So this is Baldwin the fourth of Jerusalem, whom we all know and love, of course. I have very well aware of Baldwin of Jerusalem. He became king at 13 in 11. 1174. Now, is he the one who's depicted in that really bad Orlando Bloom film, Kingdom of Heaven? He is. I haven't seen it, though. Don't bother. Okay. Of its time, early 2000s, I think. Not good. God, where's time going? Early 2000s, right? That's yesterday, sure. 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. And to have contracted it as a child, you know, that's a lifetime of suffering that you're...

stuck with. 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, and you wouldn't go. Like typhoid Mary. Very like that. Yeah, yeah. So that was, that was, yeah, go back and listen to her. Um, so physicians noticed initially that he felt no pain when he was pinched. So remember I said about the numbness in certain areas. 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. And 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. Yeah, and what does that mean? Because 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 1883, he can't walk on Aided, 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 send you. Am I right in thinking you can't blink after a while you lose the ability to blink?

Yes. Which is so grim. Sometimes the eyelids can turn in a little bit as well. Can you imagine the pain and the discomfort of that? It's so terrible. I mean, that's just, especially if you're like 13, 14, whatever. You know, if you're essentially a kid, well, he's a bit older. this point. But anyway, he, in 1184, he developed a fever and by 1185 he was dead. So, you know,

it was, well, I see it was swift, but it's not swift if you're suffering from that for 10 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he does die young man. 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 will, you'll, you're system will start to shut down because you are too dehydrated because you can't eat because 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. And I wonder if he's remembered in terms of just thinking about his legacy, if he's remembered because he had the disease. And 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 his kingship and the leprosy are intertwined in that way. 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. Sort of purification of one's own body. Yeah. 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's 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. And certainly overtakes culturally, you know, thinking about TB

and its kind of pervasiveness, particularly by the Victorian era. Yes. And that's what you hear of. Everyone with a little chill or coughing into a handkerchief has got TB. 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, 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 of amongst many things that they're infecting. But it's a very interesting thing because almost, certainly back in my day anyway, every child at 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 charitable giving and of, for me, it seemed the tensions are really rife because it's all of that that I just described

and then saying, yeah, but put them over there. Yeah, it's hard. to marry those two up, I think, even within the ideas of Christianity that we've discussed. And tell me this, when in medical practice did a cure come into play? It kind of came with the identification of the bacterium. So that's 1873 and the bacteria... Oh, you surprised me that it's, that it is in the 19th century, actually. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, it is in the 19th century. Although, I suppose, you know, 40 years into, 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've been with us for so long that they endure. But in 1873, we have the discovery of the mycobacterium lepray, 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 particular disease. Right? 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 microbial makeup. And it, yeah, it's, that starts to change things. But it does take until the 1940s.

So it does take it until the 20th century for an actual proven cure, pro men. That starts to be used in the 1940s. But now, which is the way to treatise, starts coming in in the 1980s, 1981, the multi-drug therapy. It's that late, yeah. 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 we have these MDT treatments

or we have 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. 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 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. 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. And 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. I think that'd be good. We've done the Black Deaths a few times. but I feel like I feel like there's more to do. Helen Carr is on there talking about Black Deaths.

She is, fantastic Helen Carr, yes. Loads of plague stuff back there. 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 at afterdark at historyhit.com.