Mittheilungen Und Verhandlungen Der Internationalen Wissenschaftlichen Lepra Conferenz Zu Berlin Im October 1897

"Collection of incunabula and early medical prints in the library of the Surgeon-general's office, U.S. Army": Ser. 3, v. 10, p. 1415-1436..

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The story of leprosy in the Dutch East Indies from the beginning of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th reveals important themes in the colonial enterprise across the territory that is today’s Indonesia. Operating in a territory with only a few hundred Western-trained doctors and a population in the tens of millions, Dutch colonial officials approached leprosy with uncertainty and anxiety. In the early 19th century, the Dutch administration simply removed sufferers from public view: campaigns targetted anyone “looking ugly”. Towards the end of the century, colonial science considered leprosy a hereditary disease of tropical subjects, and therefore undeserving of the colonial government’s limited resources. The leprosariums were emptied. At the start of the 20th century, a growing understanding that leprosy was spread by a bacillus caused a panic that leprosy might spread from the tropics to the colonial metropole. The mixed emotions of pity, fear and revulsion associated with management of the disease intensified, and fed into broader debates on colonial policy. The experts were unsure, and resources were never forthcoming, and despite a view that “bacteria are the same everywhere”, Dutch leprosy treatment in the East Indies mobilized traditional healing practices and relied on home care. Leo van Bergen’s detailed, attentive study to changing policies for treatment and prevention of leprosy (now often called Hansen’s disease) is fascinating medical history, and provides a useful lens for understanding colonialism in Indonesia..

Angela Ki Che Leung's meticulous study begins with the classical annals of the imperial era, which contain the first descriptions of a feared and stigmatized disorder modern researchers now identify as leprosy. She then tracks the relationship between the disease and China's social and political spheres (theories of contagion prompted community and statewide efforts at segregation); religious traditions (Buddhism and Daoism ascribed redemptive meaning to those suffering from the disease), and evolving medical discourse (Chinese doctors have contested the disease's etiology for centuries). Leprosy even pops up in Chinese folklore, attributing the spread of the contagion to contact with immoral women. Leung next places the history of leprosy into a global context of colonialism, racial politics, and "imperial danger." A perceived global pandemic in the late nineteenth century seemed to confirm Westerners' fears that Chinese immigration threatened public health. Therefore battling to contain, if not eliminate, the disease became a central mission of the modernizing, state-building projects of the late Qing empire, the nationalist government of the first half of the twentieth century, and the People's Republic of China. Stamping out the curse of leprosy was the first step toward achieving "hygienic modernity" and erasing the cultural and economic backwardness associated with the disease. Leung's final move connects China's experience with leprosy to a larger history of public health and biomedical regimes of power, exploring the cultural and political implications of China's Sino-Western approach to the disease..

Leprosy and colonialism investigates the history of leprosy in Suriname within the context of Dutch colonial power and racial conflict, from the plantation economy and the age of slavery to the modern colonial state. It explores the relationship between the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people affected with leprosy, and the political tensions and racial fears originating in colonial slave society, exerting their influence until after the decolonization up to the present day. In the book colonial sources are read from shifting perspectives, of the colonial rulers and, ‘from below’, the ruled. Though leprosy is today a neglected tropical disease, recognizing influences of our colonial heritage in our global management of health and disease, and exploring the perspectives of other cultures are essential in a time in which migration movements make the permeability of boundaries, and transmission of diseases, more common then perhaps ever before..

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"Collection of incunabula and early medical prints in the library of the Surgeon-general's office, U.S. Army": Ser. 3, v. 10, p. 1415-1436..

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Preface : encountering the photographs -- Chronology of significant events -- Introduction : an archive of skin, an archive of kin -- Ocular experiments and unruly technologies of the body -- A criminal archive of skin -- Dressing the body : Laundry and the intimacy of care -- Dreaming in pictures : Queer kinship and subaltern family albums -- Epilogue : healing encounters at the settlement..

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