Among this last tribe of diseases no one presents a more curious subject of inquiry than the European leprosy, or tubercular elephantiasis of the middle ages. This malady is now almost entirely, if not entirely, unknown as a native endemic disease on any part of the Continent of Europe; and yet from the tenth to the sixteenth century it prevailed in nearly every district of it. Laws were enacted by Princes and Courts to arrest its diffusion;—the Pope issued bulls with regard to the ecclesiastical separation and rights of the infected;[4]—a particular order of Knighthood was instituted to watch over the sick;—and leper hospitals or lazar-houses were everywhere instituted to receive the victims of the disease. The number of these houses has certainly been often erroneously stated, in consequence, as far as I have been able to trace it, of a strange mistake committed by Ducange, in quoting from Matthew Paris a passage in which that historian contrasts the respective possessions belonging in the thirteenth century to the Hospitalarii, Knights Hospitallers, or Knights of St. John, as they were termed, and the Knights Templars. The 19,000 lazar-houses in Christendom, as interpreted by Ducange, mark in Matthew Paris’ work merely the number of manors or commanderies of the Hospitalarii, and have no reference whatever to leprosy or lazar-houses.[5] But still that an immense number of leper-houses existed on the Continent at the period mentioned, is abundantly shown in many of the historical documents of that age. Louis VIII. promulgated a code of laws in 1226, for the regulation of the French leper hospitals; and these hospitals were at that date computed to amount, in the then limited kingdom of France, to not less than 2000 in number—(_deux mille leproseries_).[6] They afterwards, as is alleged by Velley,[7] even increased in number, so much so that there was scarcely a town or burgh in the country that was not provided with a leper hospital. In his history of the reign of Philip II. Mezeray uses the same language in regard to the prevalence of leprosy and leprous patients in France during the twelfth century.[8] Muratori gives a nearly similar account of the extent of the disease during the middle ages in Italy;[9] and the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Northern Europe, equally became its unfortunate victims.[10]