In my current book, I have a leprous character and so I needed to research the disease of leprosy to discover how people might have reacted to him and what my character's life would have been like as a leper.
During my research I became aware of how little human nature changes. Parallels in the attitudes towards the medieval leper and HIV and AIDS sufferers are apparent. In the 1980s, when AIDS first came to light, little was known about the disease especially by the general population. Many...