Leprosy: A Physical and Social Curse
Divine Punishment or Bacterial Spread?
Leprosy, or Hansen's Disease, is a bacterial disease that causes bodily deformations, painful welts, and the loss of appendages. Since its discovery in Egypt during the times of Christ, victims were subjected to demeaning stigmas for being unclean.
Video of HuffPost Science Correspondent Cara Santa Maria on the scientific nature of leprosy. Courtesy of HuffPost Science via YouTube (2012).
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"Leprosy is...caused by Mycobacterium leprae, an acid-fast, rod-shaped bacillus. The disease mainly affects the skin, the peripheral nerves, mucosa of the upper respiratory tract and also the eyes...Although not highly infectious, it is transmitted via droplets, from the nose and mouth, during close and frequent contacts with untreated cases." |
Leprosy's Attack Begins (1860s)
Leprosy arrived in Hawai’i sometime during the early nineteenth century and became increasingly prevalent among Hawaiians in the 1860s. Local missionaries attributed the Hawaiians' contraction as divine retribution, but the natives blamed afflicted Chinese immigrants. Nevertheless, within 10 years of the establishment of the Board of Health, there were at least 7,200 Hawaiians or 12% of the native population suffering from leprosy.
"Leprosy's introduction to the islands came as but one of many new diseases. [It was] called ma'i lepera (leprosy), ma'i pake (Chinese sickness), ma'i ali'i (chiefly sickness) and eventually ma'i ho'oka'awale 'ohana (disease that separates family) by Kanaka Maoli (natives)." "Chinese Patients"
Photos courtesy of Hansen's Disease Medical Examination Photograph Collection from the Hawai'i State Archives. |
Photo collage courtesy of J. Musick, Our New Possessions (1897).
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"Beyond any question of doubt this is the most horrible collection of lepers on earth. The typically altered face, the thickened skin from general infiltration...sagging down over the eyes, the cheeks with pillow-like protuberances, covered with broad weals, the nose nodulated and broadened, the ears loaded with neoplastic deposit and the swollen lips...then follows the period of decay, their bloated festering faces and their anesthetic ulcerated limbs render them simply repulsive caricatures of the human form." "In 1832 the native population was about 130,000. In 1850 it was about 84,000...The mortality rate was between 11% and 23% per year...of course leprosy was only a contributing factor in these deaths. The wretched living condition was more to blame than the bacillus." |
Unidentified Hansen's Disease patients.
Photos courtesy of the Hawai'i State Archives.
Photos courtesy of the Hawai'i State Archives.
Cultural Perceptions of Leprosy
Westerners feared the afflicted, but Hawaiians valued their family and often chose to live with the leprous, upsetting members of the Board of Health who wanted to isolate the ill.
"Between sickness and personhood, the latter was more important. Hence to the expressed shock and horror of Western doctors and administrators, the developed leper, in all his ugliness, deformity and corruption, is in no ways treated differently from the native brother, clean and free from all bodily imperfections...Healthy Hawaiians will eat, drink, sleep, and live with a leper voluntarily and without fear...A healthy Hawaiian man or woman will marry a leper, although there are plenty of well men and women in sight." |
"Prominent members of the Caucasian community publicly declared that leprosy was caused by licentiousness...such proclamations were made in the implicit belief that leprosy was a native disease, one which no [Caucasian] would contract. These beliefs were shattered in later years as members of the [Caucasian], Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities increasingly contracted the disease, but in the nineteenth century, leprosy primarily affected Hawaiians, owing to their poorly developed immune systems, their lack of preconceptions about the disease, and their belief that the sick should be cared for at home." |
Photo courtesy of the Baker/Van Dyke Collection from the Kamehameha Schools Archives.
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Diagram courtesy of Ethnocultural Perspectives on Disaster and Trauma (2007).
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Photo courtesy of the Hawai'i State Archives.
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