Gilbert’s picture[136], as we have said, is unmistakeable, and the same might be said of Bernard’s[137]--the eyebrows falling bare and getting knotted with uneven tuberosities, the nose and other features becoming thick, coarse and lumpy, the face losing its mobility or play of expression, the raucous voice, the loss of sensibility in the hands, and the ultimate break-up or _naufragium_ of the leprous growths into foul running sores. The enumeration of nervous symptoms, which are now recognised to be fundamental in the pathology of leprosy, shows that Gilbert went below the surface. Among the “signa leprae generalia” he mentions such forms of hyperaesthesia as _formicatio_ (the creeping of ants), and the feeling of “needles and pins;” and, in the way of anaesthesia, he speaks of the loss of sensibility from the little finger to the elbow, as well as in the exposed parts where the blanched spots or thickenings come--the forehead, cheeks, eyebrows, to which he adds the tongue. Gilbert’s whole chapter ‘De Lepra’ is an obvious improvement upon the corresponding one in Avicenna, who says that _lepra_ is a cancer of the whole body, cancer being the _lepra_ of a single member, and is probably confusing lupus with leprosy when he describes the cartilages of the nose as corroded in the latter, and the nostrils destroyed by the same kind of _naufragium_ as the fingers and toes. All students of the history or clinical characters of leprosy, from Guy de Chauliac, who wrote about 1350, down to Hensler and Sprengel, have recognised in Gilbert’s and Bernard’s account of it the marks of first-hand observation; so that we may take it, without farther debate, that leprosy, as correctly diagnosed, was a disease of Europe and of Britain in the Middle Ages.