Juliana Taube

Juliana Taube

PhD Student

Visit to The Leprosy Museum in Bergen, Norway

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I enjoyed my recent visit to The Leprosy Museum at St. Jorgen’s Hospital in Bergen, Norway. The museum has two excellent exhibits covering the social & scientific complexities of leprosy.

Poster advertising museum exhibit on "The Discovery of the Leprosy Bacteria 150 Years: 1873-2023."

Leprosy cases in the 1800s were concentrated on the western coast of Norway. Many patients lived at St. Jorgen’s Hospital and most never left. Disease led to poverty either via social stigma or physical injury.

Map of leprosy cases in Norway from 1856-1890. I'm a big fan of maps.

At the time, many assumed that the condition was inherited, while others thought it might be infectious. A detailed registry collected by Norwegians and a correlation between enforced isolation and decreased incidence supported the contagion hypothesis.

Number of people with leprosy living in institutions versus at home in Norway from 1856-1929.

Later work by Armauer Hansen, a (controversial) Norwegian scientist, and Albert Neisser (think Neisseria gonorrhoeae) showed that Mycobacterium leprae caused leprosy. This work occurred just before the formalization of Koch’s postulates (which link diseases to their causative microbial agents).

Drawings of Mycobacterium leprae. While a terrible disease, I thought these drawings were really pretty.

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