S. I. McMillen stated that the word “leprosy” brought terror into the hearts of everyone. He shared: “For many hundreds of years the dread disease leprosy had killed countless millions of people in Europe.”1
Even such scourges as the Black Death, which appeared in the fourteenth century and killed an estimated sixty million people, and syphilis, which began its reign of terror in the fifteenth century, could not elicit such a state of horrid frenzy in the hearts of people as leprosy.
By the fourteenth century it was reaping epidemic destruction in Europe and the greatest medical minds of Europe were at a loss to offer help in stemming the plague. McMillen asked: “What did the physicians offer to stop the ever-increasing ravages of Leprosy? Some taught that it was ‘brought on by eating hot food, pepper, garlic and the meat of diseased hogs.’ Other physicians said it was caused by malign conjunction of the planets. Naturally, their suggestions for prevention were utterly worthless.”2
The church, however, had a revolutionary concept that was clearly spoken about and found in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. As one reads Leviticus 13 the idea of contagion is brought out in detail, along with the solution to the spread of infectious disease.
When a person was confirmed to have leprosy, he was to be excluded and segregated from his community. (Leviticus 13:46) states: “He shall remain unclean all the days during which he has the infection; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
It must be remembered that while our doctors today know all about the concept of germs and contagious disease, a physician 500 to 1,000 years ago knew absolutely nothing; not even what a germ was.
The medical wisdom that the church found in the Holy Bible was the key to bringing the major plagues of the Dark Ages under control. If the church had not begun to implement the biblical principles regarding contagious disease, who knows how many millions of additional lives would have been snuffed out during those plague-filled years?
1 S. I. McMillen, None of These Diseases (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Jove Publications, Inc., 1981), p. 11.
2 Ibid., p. 11.