This has not always been the case. Yet, in the first …
This book is not a history of leprosy down to the present day. Leprosy, it seems, has had extraordinary potential for becoming … Leprosy and empire Rod Edmond. The disease is much older than that, however, and it is believed to have originated on the Indian subcontinent. An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the … Leprosy and Empire is ... able to offer some subtle but penetrating insights into the place of disease in imperial culture.' Indeed, the …
Cambridge University Press 9780521865845 - Leprosy and Empire - A Medical and Cultural History - by Rod Edmond Excerpt.
Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period.
Leprosy - Leprosy - History: People tend to think of leprosy as a tropical disease because most cases today are found in less-developed countries, which are mainly in the tropics. Mark Harrison, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 'The last few decades have seen an impressive number of books on the history of leprosy, and this is a useful addition to the genre. As we have seen, a mid-nineteenth-century anti-contagionist … Across the … Introduction . The book will appeal to students of … Once firmly in control of a vast empire, the Moslems supported learning, and the great caliphs, including Haroun-al-Raschid, had camel caravans laden with Greek and Latin books brought to Baghdad, where they engaged Nestorians, Jews, and Persians to translate these works containing knowledge of leprosy into Arabic as documented by the laborious efforts of Janus Damascenus (48), Issac Israeli (11 3), the …
Revulsion and fear have been the most common responses to leprosy since biblical times, yet there is slight medical basis for the recurring stigmatisation of a disease with such a very low level of infection. "Leprosy and Empire traces the history of leprosy stigma between about 1770 and 1920, searching for a 'conflicted genealogy' of leprosy stigma across a broad span of European colonial encounters, from Hawaii to Australia, New Zealand and the Cape, and how these played out in Europe." The result is rather more a series of essays with a good linking introduction than a monograph. Nor is it a narrative of the progressive elimination of ignorance and superstition by modern medical science. - Harriet Deacon, H-SAfrica. Its main focus has been the period 1840–1920, when fears of the revival and return of leprosy became entangled with the spread of Western imperialism across the globe.
It synthesizes a large existing literature on the history of leprosy management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a welcome whole, adds his own original research at intermittent points, and frames the object of inquiry—leprosy and empire—within a broadly Foucauldian analysis. An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the believed spread of leprosy.
In 1200 ce an estimated 19,000 leprosy hospitals existed all over Europe. Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period. the work of the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association (BELRA).3 Leprosy has received relatively little attention from historians of colonial medicine, who have tended to follow the disease agenda of ITM and focus on the control of tropical-parasitic diseases that most affected European health, or on the major campaigns against diseases that were politically, economically, or socially important.
Review "Rod Edmond's Leprosy and Empire is very interesting text which puts the history of …
The …