Leprosy
Culture Club/Getty Images
Leprosy is perhaps one of the most tragically misunderstood diseases in history. Like many diseases before it, medical professionals originally believed it was either something inherited or a form of punishment made manifest with disfigurement.
In either case, leper patients were shunned, quarantined and sent to “leper colonies,” such as the most famous one on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, where they would live out the remainder of their lives in isolation.
Unlike some diseases at first believed to be God’s punishment, the stigma surrounding leprosy remained even after researchers discovered its biological cause.
Because people feared catching leprosy so much, some European villages even rang bells to alert residents that a person with leprosy was nearby, so that they could avoid walking in the afflicted’s direction.
Isolation continued even as understanding about the disease and its treatment became commonplace: Sufferers were shipped off to sanitarium hospitals or entire colonies for treatment, and many of them would live out the rest of their lives away from the rest of society.
Today, a handful of people exiled to Molokai in the 1960s still live on the island, the vast majority of them native Hawaiians. Even since the quarantine’s lifting, more than a dozen people remain in the “leper colony” called Kalaupapa. It’s believed that beginning in the 1860s, as many as 8,000 people were sent there over the course of a century.
In a continued effort to de-stigmatize the condition, physicians nowadays refer to it as Hansen’s Disease. Further depriving it of its ability to induce terror, doctors now also note that as much as 95 percent of the population may be naturally immune to leprosy, and if one does contract it, it’s most likely to come from an armadillo, not a fellow human.
Though immunity to the bacteria indeed seems to have increased, it still infects as many as 250,000 people a year all over the world, and still causes disfigurement, including the loss of limbs and blindness.
While modern medicine has made some incredible strides over the last several centuries, many of the diseases whose origins have finally been uncovered still lack definitive treatment and cure.
While we look back on millennia of misinterpretation and can’t imagine how our ancestors could have been so wrong, it would do us well to remember that future generations may look back at us and wonder why we couldn’t see the answers to medicine’s biggest mysteries — which might be right in front of us.
Next, read up on the five weirdest diseases of the human body. Then, have a look at five lethal diseases you could easily mistake for the flu.
