From Foucault’s Madness and Civilization:
“At the end of the the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western World. In the margins of the community, at the gates of the cities there stretched wastelands where sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable.”
“Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely familiar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and ‘deranged minds’ would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them.”
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001) Translated by Richard Howard
