The Second Book of General Ignorance (29 page)

In the popular mind, lepers have rotting flesh and parts of their bodies drop off.

It doesn’t work like that. Leprosy – or Hansen’s disease as it’s now called – is an infectious bacterial disease that affects the skin and damages nerve-endings. This means that sufferers can’t feel pain and so repeatedly injure their fingers and toes. Over time these wounds become infected and leave disfiguring scars.

It is these injuries, not the disease itself, that cause the deformities leprosy is famous for. People can live into old age with the disease as it doesn’t attack vital organs but, left untreated, it can cause crippling disabilities and even blindness.

Leprosy is from the Greek
lepros
(‘scaly’). Ironically, it comes from the same root as the word
Lepidoptera
(‘scale wings’), the scientific name for butterflies. For many centuries, the word ‘leprosy’ was used indiscriminately to
cover a broad range of disfiguring skin diseases. A ‘leper’ might just as easily have been someone with a bad case of psoriasis. It wasn’t until 1873, when the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen (1841–1912) identified
Myco
bacterium leprae
as the cause of leprosy, that its accurate diagnosis was possible. Hansen’s discovery was groundbreaking. It was the first time a bacterium had been proven to cause a disease in humans.

Until this point, it had been assumed that leprosy was hereditary because, despite its scary reputation, it’s quite difficult to catch. About 95 per cent of people are naturally resistant to the bacterium, and even those who aren’t require prolonged close contact to become infected. In 1984, to get this point across, Pope John Paul II kissed a number of lepers in a South Korean leper colony.

The good news is that Hansen’s disease has been treatable with antibiotics since 1941. Over the last twenty years, 15 million patients have been cured but there are still some 250,000 new cases a year, and a million people worldwide are receiving, or are in need of, treatment. In 2009 121 countries recorded cases of leprosy. Even the USA recorded 150 and the UK twelve. More than half of all new cases are reported in India. Although 150,000 new cases a year sounds high, this is an infection rate of less than 1 in 10,000. According to World Health Organization standards, this officially qualifies leprosy for ‘eliminated’ status.

Europe’s only remaining leper colony is in Tichilesti in Romania. In 1991 the colony was opened and residents were free to leave. Many of them had known nothing else since childhood and decided to stay on: the colony is more like a village than a hospital, with its own farm, two churches and even a vineyard,

Leprosy is a rare example of a bacterial disease that almost exclusively attacks humans: the only other animals that can
catch leprosy naturally are chimpanzees, mangabey monkeys and nine-banded armadillos.

Leper’s bells were designed to attract people, not to keep them away.

From the earliest times, lepers were forced to live separately. In Europe they were legally forbidden to marry, make a will or appear in court – and were only allowed to talk to a non-leper if they stood downwind. In the Old Testament, God himself instructs Moses to ‘put out of the camp every leper’.

This was because leprosy was regarded as a punishment rather than an infectious disease: it was an outer ‘uncleanness’ caused by inner sin, something that God would smite you with if you harboured lustful or heretical thoughts. It was the priest, not the doctor, who declared you a leper.

In the early twelfth century two things happened to change this attitude. The first was that a number of Christian soldiers returning home from the First Crusade of 1099 were found to have picked up the disease. The second was a shift in the theological consensus concerning a key passage in the Bible. Referring to the Messiah, the prophet Isaiah wrote: ‘We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.’ The Hebrew for ‘smitten’ is
nagua.
When some unknown Biblical scholar realised that everywhere else the word occurs in the Old Testament it means specifically ‘smitten with leprosy’, the inescapable conclusion was that Isaiah had predicted Jesus would suffer on our behalf by being treated like a leper.

The effect was to rebrand leprosy as a ‘holy disease’. The
stricken Crusaders, far from being punished, were being marked out by God for special reward. St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) overcame his revulsion to embrace a leper and made the care of lepers a central part of the monastic order he founded. Henry I’s daughter, Matilda (1102–67), established a hospital for lepers at Holborn in London and publicly washed and kissed their feet. All over Europe monarchs and aristocrats competed with one another to endow leper colonies.

Lepers themselves were granted special privileges: the most important being the right to beg. In some places they were entitled to a fixed portion of all the produce sold on market day. For 200 years, although they lived separately, they mingled freely at shrines and travelled on pilgrimages. This was when the practice of lepers carrying bells and rattles started. They were used, not to warn people away, but to attract donations from them: helping a leper was a sacred act.

Attitudes hardened again after the Black Death (1348–50) – the plague was sometimes called ‘a leprosy’ – but, by the mid-fifteenth century, it hardly mattered: lepers had all but disappeared from Britain.

Lepers were particularly vulnerable to bubonic plague and tuberculosis (the TB bacterium is leprosy’s closest bacterial relative). As waves of infectious diseases spread across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the lepers’ already weakened immune systems succumbed first. Their numbers declined; soon there were too few of them left to spread the disease and their bells stopped ringing for good.

Strictly speaking, not all the pointed projections that stick out of an animal’s head are horns.

True horns have a permanent bone core surrounded by compacted strands of a protein called keratin – the same stuff that human hair and nails are made from. Animals that have them include cattle, buffalo, sheep, antelopes and horned lizards.

Animals with pointed projections that
aren’t
horns include rhinos (their ‘horns’ are made of keratin but have no bone core); deer (they have antlers which are made of bone, but covered in velvety skin not keratin, and they drop off and are regrown each year); giraffes (they have ossicones – literally ‘big bones’ – covered with furry skin but not keratin); and elephants, pigs, walruses and narwhals (they all have tusks, which are overgrown teeth, made of ivory).

Keratin is a remarkable substance. In its softer alpha form, it is what ensures our skin is flexible and waterproof and, as well as producing horn, forms the hair, fur, claws, hooves and nails of mammals. In its harder beta form, it makes the shells and scales of reptiles and the feathers and beaks of birds.

Horns, tusks and antlers have a variety of functions – they can be used as tools, or weapons, or to attract a mate – but only true horns are used to cool down. The blood vessels surrounding the bone core turn the whole horn into a device similar to a car radiator, cooling the liquid by spreading its exposure to the air, in much the same way an elephant uses its large ears. Watusi cattle, a longhorn variety native to central Africa, have enormous horns for this reason. The largest true horns ever recorded belong to a Watusi bull called Lurch: they measured 92.5 centimetres (3 feet) long and weighed 45 kilograms (7 stones) each.

When the keratinous part of a true horn is slid off its bone core, it becomes a useful hollow object. Since prehistory, humans used these for drinking vessels and musical instruments and, later, to carry gunpowder in. The substance known as ‘horn’ was carved into buttons, handles and combs, made into book bindings or windows (it is translucent if shaved thinly) and boiled down for glue.

There are various accounts of humans growing ‘horns’ of the non-bony type. One of the strangest concerns Anna Schimper, ‘the horned nun of Filzen’. In 1795 her nunnery in
the Rhineland was occupied by French troops and the nuns evicted. The shock sent Anna mad and she was committed to an asylum. After years spent banging her head against a table, a horn started to grow from the bump on her forehead. The more it grew, the less deranged she became until she was soon sane enough to return to the nunnery, where she became abbess.

By 1834 her horn had grown to such a length that it was hard to conceal under her wimple, so she decided to have it removed. Although she was eighty-seven and the operation was both bloody and painful, she survived and lived for two more years. By the time she died her mysterious therapeutic horn had started to grow again.

You don’t – any more than you would milk a bull.

Yaks are the males of the species
Bos grunniens
(Latin for ‘grunting ox’), and they live in Tibet and Nepal. Westerners who speak of milking yaks are a staple butt of Tibetan jokes.

The female of the species is called a ‘dri’ or ‘nak’. Their milk contains twice as much fat as that of lowland cows. Contrary to some web sources, it is not pink: on the rare occasions it is drunk, blood is sometimes added for flavour. It is golden-coloured and mainly made into yoghurt, cheese and butter. Tibetans put butter in their tea, use it for face lotion and lamp fuel and make it into ritual sculptures.

In Lhasa, fresh yak meat is for sale, draped in slabs over the branches of trees, or stacked in wheelbarrows direct from the slaughterhouse. Butchery is a hereditary trade and all butchers are Muslims. Rancid butter is piled directly on to the paving
stones. The whole of Tibet smells of dri butter.

Wild yaks can be 1.95 metres (6 feet 5 inches) at the shoulder; domestic yaks are usually half that height. To operate effectively in the thin air at heights of 5,500 metres (18,000 feet) and temperatures of –40°C (or –40°F – they are the same at that value), yak blood cells are half the size and three times as numerous as those of ordinary cattle.

Yak bones are used to make jewellery and tent fastenings. The horns are carved into knife handles and musical instruments. The tails are exported to India where they are used as fly whisks. The dung is collected and burnt as fuel.

Yaks have the longest hair of any animal. It can grow to be 60 centimetres (2 feet) long on the torso and is used to make rope, clothing, bags, sacks, shoes, tents and coracles. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the most sought-after material (after human hair) for making gentlemen’s wigs.

The fashion for wearing wigs began with Louis XIII (1601–43) – who went prematurely bald in 1624 – and ended with the French Revolution. Wigs were often as expensive as the rest of a man’s clothing put together. Today, the BBC can call upon yak-hair wigs from the 10,000 false hair items available to it, and fancy-dress shops offer Santa Claus beards in 100 per cent yak hair.

Dob-dobs
were monks from the Se-ra monastery in Tibet who specialised in the collection of yak dung. By the late nineteenth century they’d evolved into a combination of monastic police force and predatory gay mafia. They would occasionally venture down to the nearby city of Lhasa to pick fights and kidnap young boys. They were easily recognised because they kept the skirts of their habits kilted up higher than regular Buddhist monks. This gave them a bulky look round the thighs, which they exaggerated by swinging their buttocks as they walked.