Leprosy in the Mediterranean Medical Literature

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Leprosy in the Mediterranean Medical Literature is written by Anna Gili and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3111331512 (ISBN 10) and 9783111331515 (ISBN 13).

Recent studies have underlined the importance of consulting different sources to trace global histories of diseases. However, due to a lack of critical editions of medical works, leprosy is poorly understood, and a wider interpretation of it as a historical phenomenon is yet to be proposed. Building on a broad critical editing and analysis of Arabic and Latin texts, this book traces a new history of leprosy moving from late antiquity to the Islamic and Latin Middle Ages, thus proving the necessity of a comparative approach to grasp its Mediterranean scope. Challenging established historical reconstructions, this study demonstrates that Arabic texts were familiar with a scientific approach to contagiousness. It also shows how, when faced with the diffusion of leprosy as an endemic disease, Latin physicians tried to solve the enigma of its nature avoiding any moral censorship. Each chapter includes the relevant texts, all related to al-Maǧūsī’s encyclopedia Kitāb al-Malakī (10th c.), in critical edition with an English translation. The book aims to contribute historians from different areas with a realistic picture of how theoretical, learned medicine considered leprosy, opening the possibility of broader research on other sources.