Lepers and Poor Scholars: Care Within and Without Hospitals in Late Medieval German Cities (original) (raw)

Abstract

In popular culture and in some scholarship, medieval lepers and leper hospitals have often become symbols for an approach to healthcare assumed to have been based on fear, and a lack of hygienic understanding or infrastructure. In late medieval canon law, however, leper hospitals (leprosaria) were but one category of hospital among several. Moreover, documents of practice from the cities of Mainz, Worms, and Frankfurt demonstrate that lepers were provided with care outside the hospital walls, as well as inside them. Lepers could reside in leprosaria, or appear alongside poor scholars as the recipients of food, shoes, and clothing, as in the records of Mainz. The vocabulary of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century hospital charters suggests that lepers might have chosen seasonal residence in hospitals, begging in the surrounding territory at other times. When lepers are directly visible, it is customarily in pragmatic exchanges. Donations from the burghers of Mainz and Worms to the cities’ hospitals reveal considerable knowledge of the needs of the sick, indicating that hospitals, although often positioned on the urban periphery, remained integrated with city life. The stories of the men and women who sought diagnoses from the doctors of Frankfurt also reveal a range of late medieval responses to leprosy, from the sick and their communities. This most infamous of medieval diseases provides me with a starting point for reexamining the provision of care for the sick in late medieval cities.

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