Leprosy at Contact: The Global Dissemination of Leprosy in the Pre-1500 World

This is the abstract and bibliography of a paper presented on 19 February 2026 at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in San Francisco, CA. Taking up work that Green has been doing the past two decades in tracing the outlines of the global history of leprosy on the basis of documentary, paleopathological, and genomic evidence, the talk laid out some of the major historical questions that will need to be asked, now that the global dissemination of the two species of leprosy--Mycobacterium leprae and M. lepromatosis--has been confirmed for the pre-Contact period. The abstract is supplemented by a complete list of works cited in the talk.