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Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman.

Leprecy, also known as Hanson's disease. It's a chronic infectious disease caused by

mycubacterium leprey. It's a disease that can have a devastating effect on those who catch it,

affecting the skin and eventually the bones, the peripheral nerves, the eyes and the respiratory

tract. It's also a disease with a lot of stigma and myths attached to it. Many of them

going back to the Middle Ages. And the image of the medieval leper as an outcast from society

is a common one. But is that really true? Were those affected by Leprecy really

considered to be outcasts in medieval society? And how exactly were they dealt with and treated

in somewhere like medieval England? To find that more, I've invited long Dr. Simon Roffy,

who's a reader in medieval archaeology at the University of Winchester.

Thank you for joining me on Gone Medieval here today, Simon. So you've got lots of different

specialisms in this field, but you've also directed excavations of an actual medieval

leper hospital in Winchester, which we're going to go back to a little bit later on.

But to sort of start off this episode, I was hoping you could talk a little bit more generally

about lepercy, just into how he can study it. Because of course, studying disease in the

past is actually quite hard. But what about lepercy? How can we get evidence and see anything

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