JISC

Leprosy is a debilitating disease with a strong social stigma. Once common throughout the old world, it is still encountered in the developing world. This project seeks to digitise data pertaining to leprous medieval skeletons and clinical x-rays of modern sufferers to allow medical historians, palaeopathologists, clinicians and the interested public to observe and better understand the skeletal lesions of this disease, how they manifest across the skeleton and how they arise.

Visit the digital collection

This will also offer an opportunity to inspire an emotional response from the wider public (to give them a chance to feel an affinity with the past and to better understand past human experiences). By offering people the chance to come face-to-face with the realities of the disease it provides the chance to gain insight into how people in the past may have responded to the social stigma of the disease.

3D laser scans of affected bones from the medieval leprosarium of St. James and Mary Magdalene, Chichester, alongside digitised x-rays of these individuals and those of clinical cases will be disseminated via an interactive GIS cemetery plan and associated database, with pathological descriptions. The project requires rapid digitisation now to ensure the sustainability of this unique, but extremely fragile collection. As part of our method development we seek to address problems (including conversion of the raw point clouds to fully-textured 3D models to facilitate data storage) that will be common to other osteological collections and the approach will thus have widespread impact and transferability to other osteological material. The approach that we propose represents a pilot to developing standards for the wider use of 3D scanning with osteological remains. This will facilitate preservation by record in circumstances where collections may be considered to be under threat (e.g. subject to reburial constraints and other legal/ethical issues; fragile pathological specimens and collections subject to heavy user interest and thus the threat of damage through attrition).