Here we have sufficient evidence, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, of a disease being called _lepra_ which does not conform to the conditions of leprosy as we now understand them. The same confusion between leprosy and the _lues venerea_ prevailed through the whole medieval period. Thus, in the single known instance of a severe edict against lepers in England, the order of Edward III. to the mayor and sheriffs of London in 1346[141], the reasons for driving lepers out of the City are given,--among others, because they communicate their disease “by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places,” and by their polluted breath. It was pointed out long ago by Beckett in his paper on the antiquity of the _lues venerea_[142], that the polluted breath was characteristic of the latter, but not of leprosy. Of course the pollution of their breath might have meant no more than the theoretical reasoning of the books (as in Gilbert, where the breath of lepers, as well as the mere sight of them, is said to give the disease, p. 337), but the breath was probably obnoxious in a more real way, just as we know, from Gordonio’s case at Montpellier, that the other alleged source of “leprous” contagion was no mere theoretical deduction. As the medieval period came to an end the leper-houses (in France) were found to contain a miscellaneous gathering of cases generically called leprous; and about the same time, the year 1488, an edict of the same purport as Edward III.’s London one of 1346, was issued by the provost of Paris against _les lépreux_ of that city. The year 1488 is so near the epidemic outburst of the _morbus Gallicus_ during the French campaigns on Italian soil in 1494-95, that the historian has not hesitated to set down that sudden reappearance of leprous contagion, in a proclamation of the State, to a real prevalence already in Paris of the contagious malady which was to be heard of to the farthest corners of Europe a few years after[143]. There is no difficulty in producing evidence from medieval English records of the prevalence of _lues venerea_, which was not concealed under the euphemistic or mistaken diagnosis of leprosy. Instances of a very bad kind, authenticated with the names of the individuals, are given in Gascoigne’s _Liber Veritatum_, under the date of 1433[144]. In the medieval text-books of Avicenna, Gilbert and others, there are invariably paragraphs on _pustulae et apostemata virgae_. In the only original English medical work of those times, by John Ardern, who was practising at Newark from 1349 to 1370, and came afterwards to London, appearances are described which can mean nothing else than condylomata[145]. From a manuscript prescription-book of the medieval period, in the British Museum, I have collected some receipts (or their headings) which relate, as an index of later date prefixed to the MS. says, to “the pox of old[146].”