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Colonizing Leprosy: Imperialism and the Politics of Public Health in the United States
Author(s): Michelle T. Moran (Author)
- Publisher: University North Carolina Pr
- Publication Date: 15 Sept. 2007
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 296 pages
- ISBN-10: 0807858390
- ISBN-13: 9780807858394
Book Description
By comparing institutions in Hawai’i and Louisiana designed to incarcerate individuals with a highly stigmatized disease, Colonizing Leprosy provides an innovative study of the complex relationship between U.S. imperialism and public health policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the Kalaupapa Settlement in Moloka’i and the U.S. National Leprosarium in Carville, Michelle Moran shows not only how public health policy emerged as a tool of empire in America’s colonies, but also how imperial ideologies and racial attitudes shaped practices at home.
Although medical personnel at both sites considered leprosy a colonial disease requiring strict isolation, Moran demonstrates that they adapted regulations developed at one site for use at the other by changing rules to conform to ideas of how “natives” and “Americans” should be treated. By analyzing administrators’ decisions, physicians’ treatments, and patients’ protests, Moran examines the roles that gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality played in shaping both public opinion and health policy.
Colonizing Leprosy makes an important contribution to an understanding of how imperial imperatives, public health practices, and patient activism informed debates over the constitution and health of American bodies.Editorial Reviews
Review
“A terrific case study of the complex interplay between core and periphery in the history of U.S. imperial public health. . . . A marvelous rendering of a complex story.” —
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History“An excellent and well written contribution to the literature on public health and leprosy.” —
Medical History“This intelligent, nuanced, and carefully argued study approaches the U.S. experience with leprosy in a productive and revealing way. . . . Provides a useful model for doing comparative history. It is an excellent addition to the literature on modern empire.” —
American Historical Review“Well written, draws on a broad range of primary sources, and deserves to be read as a cautionary tale of the destructive paring of stigma and paternalism, whether colonial or not.” —
Journal of American History
