The leper's hands

As part of the ‘Error bred in the bone’ project I started looking at evidence of leprosy in the BARC collection.  Now the evidence of the disease in the collection in two main forms: The bones from the medieval cemetery of St James and Mary Magdalene in Chichester and the Andersen Archive a collection of x-rays from a leper’s hospital in Addis Ababa in the 1980s.  You can see the online catalogue here
http://www.barc.brad.ac.uk/FromCemeterytoClinic/

One of the common myths about leprosy is that your fingers, toes and nose drop off.  It’s not true.  What does happen is that the bacteria are most active in in the cooler parts of the body; the extremities and the nasal passage.  What happens is your body starts to reabsorb your bone and so your fingers and toes start to shorten and the bones in the nose start to disappear.  In the early stages sometime the fingers lock into a ‘claw’.

I find the Andersen archive heart breaking.  These were images taken living memory, in fact Dr Keith Manchester says he thinks he can identify some of the patients form these x-rays from his time out at the hospital.  And 30 years ago the medication was good but wouldn’t have halted the loss of bone.  The patients’ hands in these x-rays would have continued to deteriorate after the image was taken.

These x-rays have become the starting point for some digital stitch pieces that I will talk about in a future post.