Each of the several authors just now named has described, with greater or less precision, the symptoms of the prevailing leprosy, or chronic incurable cutaneous disease, for the reception and seclusion of the victims of which the numerous lazar-houses in Europe were established. The details which they all individually give of the leading characters of the malady[173] are in their essential points altogether similar; and the symptoms which they describe it as presenting are exactly those which distinguish Greek elephantiasis. The disease is portrayed with brevity and precision by some of them. Others enter into a detail of its phenomena, greatly more minute than the descriptions I have quoted from Bateman and Schedel; and several give a history of the marks to be derived from the blood, urine, extremities, eyes, face, voice, etc., in a manner so very elaborate and minute, as might surprise us at the present day, did we not recollect the immense importance that depended in these times upon a just and faithful distinction of the disease, when, in a suspected case, a fellow-being might,—by the absence of the more characteristic signs—be saved, or—by their presence—be condemned, for the remainder of life, to all the horrors of a lazar-house. A few, as Guy de Chauliac, Argelata, etc., in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in still later times, Gregory Horst, Forrestus, etc., add a most minute and detailed account of the various symptoms which the physician ought to look for in examining a suspected person, and point out the exact mode in which he ought to proceed with this examination before venturing to consign a suspected person to the seclusion of a leper hospital, and thus for ever doom him to be a despised “child of St. Lazarus.” In an essay such as the present, it would be out of place to attempt to show, by the exact words of each of the authors to whom I have just now alluded, the truth of the proposition that the lepra in their writings, and consequently the lepra of Europe in their times, was strictly identical with the elephantiasis of the Greeks, and that the leper hospitals were specially intended for those affected with this disease. As examples, however, of the whole, I may cite the observations of two of the authors whom I have named; and I shall select for this purpose Gordon and Guy de Chauliac, principally from their two names standing higher in medical history than most of the others that I have enumerated—from their living at a time when the disease was most prevalent,—and from their descriptions of the malady itself being on the whole more than usually concise and methodic.