Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History

Rod Edmond0521865840, 9780521865845, 9780511261398

An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the believed spread of leprosy. Across the empire this involved isolating victims of the disease in ‘colonies’, often on offshore islands. Discussion of the segregation of lepers is then extended to analogous examples of this practice, which, it is argued, has been an essential part of the repertoire of colonialism in the modern period. The book also examines literary representations of leprosy in Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century writing, and concludes with a discussion of traveller-writers such as R. L. Stevenson and Graham Greene who described and fictionalised their experience of staying in a leper colony.

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Table of contents :
Contents……Page 9
Illustrations……Page 10
Acknowledgements……Page 11
Introduction……Page 13
Leprosy in the Pacific and Atlantic worlds……Page 36
Leprosy and Romantic writing……Page 41
Classifying leprosy……Page 49
Leprosy in Norway……Page 56
The 1867 Royal College of Physicians’ Report……Page 63
Milroy in the West Indies……Page 73
Hansen and Mycobacterium leprae……Page 79
Heredity or contagion? Overlapping positions……Page 89
The fear of return……Page 92
Leprosy at home……Page 98
The death of Father Damien……Page 102
The Berlin International Leprosy Conference, 1897……Page 115
The Royal College of Physicians……Page 119
The tropics and disease……Page 122
The tropics and the metropolis……Page 131
Leprosy and literature in the Victorian period……Page 143
Summary……Page 153
Total institutions……Page 155
Molokai……Page 157
Robben Island……Page 168
Australia……Page 175
New Zealand……Page 180
Summary……Page 186
The colony……Page 190
Camp-thinking……Page 195
The concentration camp……Page 199
The Native American reservation……Page 203
The Aboriginal reserve……Page 205
Metropolitan colonies……Page 208
Lock hospitals……Page 213
Smallpox isolation……Page 216
Tuberculosis sanatoria……Page 218
The Essex leper colony……Page 222
Conclusion……Page 229
Crossing the boundary……Page 232
Charles Warren Stoddard……Page 234
Robert Louis Stevenson……Page 236
Jack London……Page 243
Graham Greene……Page 245
Paul Theroux……Page 253
Postscript……Page 257
Index……Page 261