01470nas a2200205   4500000000100000008004100001260000900042653001700051653001600068653001100084653002600095653002600121653001200147100001600159245010600175300001000281490000700291520095200298022001401250       2003                            d  c200310aBacteriology10aColonialism10aEurope10aHistory, 19th Century10aHistory, 20th Century10aleprosy1 aRobertson J00aLeprosy and the elusive M. leprae: colonial and Imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century.  a13-400 v103 a<p>In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M.leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.</p>  a0104-5970