At the present day tubercular leprosy is still regarded as a disease which sets at defiance all the powers of the medical art. Our ancestors had so firm a belief in the same doctrine, that, in the case of one of the unfortunate wretches who was tried in Edinburgh in 1597 for witchcraft, amongst the gravest of the accusations brought against the panel was this, that she (Christian Livingstone) “affirmit that she culd haill (cure) leprosie, quhilk (the libel adds) the maist expert men in medicine are not abil to do.” Some of the means of cure she had employed have never, I am afraid, been allowed a place in any of our pharmacopœias. I may allude, therefore, as a specimen to one of them amongst others—viz. (and I quote the words of the libel) “she took a reid cock, slew it, baked a bannock (cake) with the blude of it, and gaf (gave) the samyn to the Leper to eat.”[54] I leave it to the dogmatism of the pharmacologists to decide whether more potent virtues should be ascribed to this recipe of Christian Livingstone’s or to that deliberately offered with the same purport by our celebrated countryman Michael Scott. “It ought to be known” (says the great Fifeshire philosopher) “that the blood of dogs and of infants two years old or under, when diffused through a bath of heated water, dispels the Leprosy without a doubt” (_absque dubio liberat Lepram_).[55] The miraculous properties of the relics of saints were in some instances strongly relied upon as an article of the Materia Medica, fit among other things to cure this incurable malady. Fosbroke[56] mentions a fountain near Moissac, described by Peyrat (abbot of that place, in the fourteenth century), the waters of which were so medicated by the relics of a saint contained in the neighbouring abbey that the crowds of lepers who resorted to it bathed and were immediately cured. But the valued fountain was not sufficiently powerful to avert the disease being communicated to the monks, or to save them even when once they were contaminated; and at last, according to the confessions of the abbot, it was shut up in consequence of some of the order dying of the very malady which their famed waters could infallibly remove. In the sequel, when considering the causes of the disease, and the regulations of medical police, adopted in regard to the infected, I shall have occasion to speak at length of the strict rules to which the inmates of most of the leper-hospitals were subjected—not for the sake of medical treatment, but with the purpose only of preventing the dissemination of the malady.