Leprosy in the Medieval Mediterranean

Given the variety of its pathological manifestations, leprosy was difficult for physicians in the past to recognise. They attempted to provide different pathological descriptions, distinct aetiologies, and varied clinical portraits to grasp its nature. Even the proposed treatments, although often influenced by the Galenic discovery of theriac, show considerable variation.

This talk explores some of the texts composed in the medieval Arabic, Latin, and Greek worlds that sought to capture this multifaceted pathology, with the aim of providing a commentary that goes beyond the narrow focus on contagion typical of scholarship on the subject.

Drawing on my recent book Leprosy in the Mediterranean Medical Literature (De Gruyter, 2025), I examine these texts through the combined lenses of philology and the history of medicine to reconstruct a history of leprosy that is, at the same time, a history of authors, texts, translations, and cultural exchanges.

At the centre of the talk will be al-Majūsī’s Kitāb al-Malakī, a work that both draws upon and goes beyond antique and late antique doctrines on the nature and treatment of the disease.

This text will be placed in dialogue with earlier Arabic works such as Sarābiyūn’s Compendium, al-Ṭabarī’s al-Muʿālajāt al-Buqrāṭiyya, and al-Zahrāwī’s Kitāb al-Taṣrīf.

I will then turn to the Latin and Greek translations of the Kitāb al-Malakī to examine how the Arabic author’s biologically grounded, non-moralising approach to the disease was conveyed by its translators.