title: Leprosy and the elusive M. leprae: colonial and Imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century.
abstract: In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M.leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford, UK. jo.robertson@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk
authors.forename: Jo
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Robertson
mesh_terms: D001432:Bacteriology / Q000266:history*; D018595:Colonialism / Q000266:history*; D005060:Europe; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D007918:Leprosy / Q000266:history*