Herodotus
[20]
informs us that the Jewish laws concerning the leprosy
were borrowed from the practice of the Egyptians. And, indeed, the same
distemper required the same remedies. The Greeks and the primitive
Romans were strangers to these laws, as well as to the disease. The
climate of Egypt and Palestine rendered them necessary; and the facility
with which this disease is spread is sufficient to make us sensible of
the wisdom and sagacity of those laws.
Even we ourselves have felt the effects of them. The Crusades
brought the leprosy amongst us; but the wise regulations made at that
ime hindered it from infecting the mass of the people.
We find by the law of the Lombards
[21]
that this disease was spread
in Italy before the Crusades, and merited the attention of the
legislature. Rotharis ordained that a leper should be expelled from his
house, banished to a particular place, and rendered incapable of
disposing of his property; because from the very moment he had been
turned out of his house he was reckoned dead in the eye of the law. In
order to prevent all communication with lepers, they were rendered
incapable of civil acts.
I am apt to think that this disease was brought into Italy by the
conquests of the Greek emperors, in whose armies there might be some
soldiers from Palestine or Egypt. Be that as it may, the progress of it
was stopped till the time of the Crusades.
It is related that Pompey's soldiers returning from Syria brought a
distemper home with them not unlike the leprosy. We have no account of
any regulation made at that time; but it is highly probable that some
such step was taken, since the distemper was checked till the time of
the Lombards.
It is now two centuries since a disease unknown to our ancestors was
first transplanted from the new world to ours, and came to attack human
nature even in the very source of life and pleasure. Most of the
principal families in the south of Europe were seen to perish by a
distemper that had grown too common to be ignominious, and was
considered in no other light than in that of its being fatal. It was the
thirst of gold that propagated this disease; the Europeans went
continually to America, and always brought back a new leaven of it.
Reasons drawn from religion seemed to require that this punishment
of guilt should be permitted to continue; but the infection had reached
the bosom of matrimony, and given the vicious taint even to guiltless
infants.
As it is the business of legislators to watch over the health of the
citizens, it would have been a wise part in them to have stopped this
communication by laws made on the plan of those of Moses.
The plague is a disease whose infectious progress is much more
rapid. Egypt is its principal seat, whence it spreads over the whole
globe. Most countries in Europe have made exceedingly good regulations
to prevent this infection, and in our times an admirable method has been
contrived to stop it; this is by forming a line of troops round the
infected country, which cuts off all manner of communication.
The Turks,
[22]
who have no such regulations, see the Christians
escape this infection in the same town, and none but themselves perish;
they buy the clothes of the infected, wear them, and proceed in their
old way, as if nothing had happened. The doctrine of a rigid fate, which
directs their whole conduct, renders the magistrate a quiet spectator;
he thinks that everything comes from the hand of God, and that man has
nothing more to do than to submit.
