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21 C h a p t e r 1 Leprosy as a Concept r. Meir b. Baruch of rothenburg (Maharam), a thirteenth-century Ashkenazi halakhic respondent, devoted one of his many responsa to the connection between leprosy and the laws of inheritance. The precise wording of the question posed to him has not survived, but his brief answer covers many of the issues to be addressed in this section. “He who maintains that the leper is considered a dead person for the purposes of inheritance,” r. Meir wrote, “it is a deed of the Sadducees, and it is nonsense to ask such a thing. The words of the legal guardians are correct and there is no reason for delay in this ruling.”1 At first glance it seems difficult to reconstruct the context in which the question was asked; the text is obscure and offers little information. But, in fact, the basic outlines of the issue at hand may be discerned. A set of heirs had to divide an inheritance and sought to exclude one of their number, a leper, on the grounds that he was considered legally dead. This gambit, had it succeeded, would have enlarged the portions of the remaining heirs. r. Meir rejected the heirs’ argument, refused to accept the equivalence of the leper to a dead person, supported the intention of the inheritance’s trustees to grant a portion to the leper, and sharply—even harshly—rebuked the other heirs. What Is Leprosy? Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, is widely considered to be one of the most severe human afflictions. Even today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when leprosy is much less widespread than it was in the past, we still 22 CHAPTER 1 think of it as a fatal, degenerative, disfiguring, incurable, isolating malady. In its most severe manifestations, the disease attacks the arms and legs and, in acute cases, leads to loss of limbs, mutilation of the body, and severe distortion of the face. For this reason, leprosy has been, throughout history, the subject of beliefs and prejudices, some of them with foundation and others fantastical. Over the ages, a social construction of repulsion has been built around leprosy and has been applied not only to those who actually suffer from the disease, but also to anyone who has been diagnosed or labeled as a leper, including some who are not infected at all. Modern scholarship and science have accumulated considerable medical , historical, and sociological knowledge about leprosy, but the disease and its sufferers continue to unsettle many of us. Our medical understanding remains incomplete, and a number of aspects of the disease continue to be debated in medical literature. It was not until relatively recently that drugs were found that can ameliorate or even cure the disease. The number of sufferers has declined over the last several decades, largely thanks to the activities of governments, relief organizations, and international bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Through public education and the dispensing of medication, the number of new infections and the disease’s geographic range have been drastically reduced.2 The disease we call leprosy is more properly known today as Hansen’s disease, named after the Norwegian physician who in 1873 first isolated and identified the agent that causes it—Mycobacterium leprae. The infection mechanism is better understood today, and it seems almost certain that environmental and genetic factors both play an important role. Today we know that the incubation period is between three and five years. Despite the revulsion and the intense fear of infection that the disease elicits, close to 90 percent of the vector’s carriers never display any clinical symptoms, and the body’s immune system overcomes the bacterium without any need for medication . Apparently, a genetic defect affecting the immune system explains the high rate of infection within families. Infection is a slow process and requires long and steady exposure. Medical literature distinguishes among several different forms of the disease. Lepromatous leprosy, the most severe, is typified by the development of hard nodules in the skin and the deterioration and disintegration of tissues. These lepers lose their limbs, they develop a whistle in their breathing, and their faces emit unpleasant odors. Tubercular leprosy, in contrast, is characterized by light, sharply defined spots on the skin. In both forms, the bacterium attacks the nervous system, in particular nerves in those parts of the body that are cool (30 degrees centigrade is the bacterium’s...

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