ABSTRACT
In May 1556 Gereon Sailer, a physician in the south-German city of Augsburg, informed the municipal Alms Office about the problems he faced as he examined the city’s poor residents. In many cases, he had to defend a shelter reserved for lepers from undeserving people who claimed that his judgments were unfair. As Sailer complained, “they always want to push their way into the house by force, they say ‘so and so’ [a current occupant] is in the house and also not completely leprous.”1 His unflattering description implied that the protesters might try to deceive him about their conditions; but the main problem was that they understood, as Sailer did, that leprosy was diagnosed by degrees. Since a person could be ‘not completely leprous,’ or demonstrate some signs of the disease but not others, a judgment left a great deal to Sailer’s professional discretion. Working among the desperately poor, his primary task was to fend off eager seekers of charity rather than to identify the leprous from the manifest signs on their bodies and in their blood.
