The key question is how ostracism fits into the history of leprosy in Europe. Thanks in part to biblical injunctions that command those with leprosy to dwell outside the main camp — even though some scholars now believe that those words don't actually refer to the specific infection — leprosy in Christian societies has long been linked to separation of some sort. But, as Elma Brenner of the University of Cambridge explored in a 2010 paper in the journal History Compass, research has challenged the "predominant view" that sufferers in medieval Western European society were "excluded and stigmatized" the way the show's "stone men" are.