Putting my decades of medical practice to use, I bring you the chance to brush up on all the gruesome diseases you don’t remember, especially if they’re ones you never knew about in the first place.

It’s tongue in cheek, but, if you’re squeamish or easily offended, you may prefer a blog about macramé instead.

Feeling out of sorts lately? If friends think you look tired, colleagues call you burnt out, and Great-Aunt Frieda reckons you need a tonic, better check out your appearance in the bathroom mirror. Are your fancy new glasses slipping down your nose? If so, either you’ve been too busy to pop into Specsavers to get them adjusted, or that jaunt to South America didn’t agree with you.

You may have got New World Leishmaniasis. Don’t let the name fool you. It’s as old as the hills, and it’s still a neglected disease. The parasite finds a sandfly to hang out in, until the sandfly finds you. Within 18 months or so, the bridge of the nose collapses. Leishmaniasis also destroys the mouth and tongue, so that bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin you’ve been saving tastes just like British sherry. Soon, however, you will no longer care.

The cause of all the trouble is the innocent-looking leishmania parasite with a cute little tail. Rather like a spermatozoon, actually. But, unlike pregnancy, leishmaniasis can be avoided by simple measures such as sleeping on the roof. Sandflies can’t fly much higher than three metres. 

What could be worse than leishmaniasis, apart from income tax, baldness, and wheel clamps? It’s the infection so dreadful that doctors often refer to it as Hansen’s disease to avoid inducing panic in the waiting room. The condition starts with a bit of catarrh then progresses to muscle pains, enlarged lymph nodes, and sometimes a patchy rash.  If you’re any kind of hypochondriac at all, you’ll suspect from the very first sneeze that this is leprosy.

Soon you lose a little pigmentation, then a few fingers because they’re numb and you chop them up with the celery. By the time leprosy bacilli gets into their stride, the face is covered in boils and bumps, and friends are apt to be too busy to see you. There may be other complications including inflamed testicles and a spleen the consistency of sago. But enough. More details might be in poor taste.

Leprosy is highly infectious. Or else it isn’t. The experts don’t all agree. If your doctor rushed out of the consulting room, you’ll know which school of thought she favours. One study showed that the only sure way of contracting leprosy is to share a bed for twelve years with a leprosy patient. So there’s really no need to avoid waiting rooms, though you might want to steer clear of lactating ladies with leprosy because they shed the bacilli like there’s no tomorrow.

Actually, there is a tomorrow because leprosy is curable. Too bad that treating an entire village for a month costs nearly as much as a good lunch for four, not including service. 

In the next instalment of The Most Disgusting Diseases in the World (and How to Catch Them), I’ll be talking about conditions affecting hands, feet, and other members.

My earlier version of this series originally appeared in Punch, an iconic magazine that eventually succumbed to circulation problems.