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Hansen's Disease

Leprosy

Leprosy in India (by Hawaii. Dept. of Foreign Affairs)
Prize Essays on Leprosy (by New Sydenham Society)
Lepers : Thirty-Six Years' Work Among Th... (by Jackson, John)
The Molokai Settlement (Illustrated) Ter... (by Hawaii. Board of Health)
Leprosy in the Philippines and Its Treat... (by Mercado, Eliodoro Donato)
Decisions of the Commissioner for Tradem... Volume 1889-1895
The recrudescence of leprosy and its cau... (by Tebb, William)

“Like the other patients, they caught me at school. It was on the Big Island. I was twelve then. I cried like the dickens for my mother and for my family. But the Board of Health didn’t waste no time in those days. They sent me to Honolulu, to Kalihi Receiving Station, real fast. Then they sent me to Kalaupapa. That’s where they sent most of us. Most came to die.” These were the words of a man who contracted leprosy, and was sent to the remote peninsula of Molokai, Hawaii, to live out his days in exile.

Leprosy is one of the most highly stigmatized and least understood diseases. For millennia, it's been thought of as what the Bible called "dirty and unclean" and has consistently been used in literature and cultures throughout the ages as a metaphor for both physical and spiritual uncleanliness. (Writer Susan Sontag discusses the issue through the stigmatization of cancer in her critical work, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors.) Stories passed down and first-hand accounts show consistent alienation from society imposed upon people with leprosy. This systematic expulsion resulted in exiled leper colonies that still exist to this day.

Myths on leprosy persist. Popular and misinformed opinions hold that it is highly contagious, causes limb loss, is a fatal disease. This misperception leads to the notion that people who contract leprosy must be exiled to contain the disease. These are untrue. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) actively campaigns to dispel these falsities. In order to help separate myth from fact, leprosy was renamed Hansen's disease after G. H. Armauer Hansen discovered the bacteria that caused it in 1873. It is manageable today with a multidrug regimen, and even easier to rein in when it is caught in the early stages.

While cases of leprosy fell to under one in 10,000 people in 1989, the disease still lingers in various pockets of the world. The U.S. registered 178 new cases of Hansen's disease as recently as 2015. The Atlantic, Huffington Post, NPR, and The Daily Beast published highly informative articles on the state of the disease today.

While accounts from the past often tell a different story, they remain interesting historical documents that archive the surreal and solitary sufferings of people forced to make a life for themselves in exile. For these accounts, check out Leprosy in India from the Hawaii Department of Foreign Affairs, Prize Essays on Leprosy by New Sydenham Society, Lepers: Thirty-Six Years Work Among Them by Jackson John, and The Molokai Settlement by Hawaii Board of Health.

By Thad Higa