The present paper examines the first attempts to internationalise the problem of leprosy, a subject hitherto overlooked by historians of imperialism and disease. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw many in the 'civilised countries' of the imperialist West gripped by a paranoia about an invasion of leprosy via germ-laden immigrants and returning expatriates who had acquired the infection in leprosy-endemic colonial possessions. Such alarmists clamoured for the adoption of vigorous leper segregation policies in such colonies. But the contagiousness of leprosy did not go unquestioned by other westerners. The convocation in Berlin of the first international meeting on leprosy revealed the interplay of differing and sometimes incompatible views about the containment of leprosy by segregation. The roles of officials from several countries, as well as the roles of five protagonists (Albert Ashmead, Jules Goldschmidt, Edvard Ehlers, Armauer Hansen, and Phineas Abraham) in the shaping of the Berlin Conference are here examined.
This study describes the circumstances under which enumerations of "lepers" were conducted in India in the late 19th century, and the ideological biases of the respective investigators and the meanings that they read into the statistics. This report focuses on the Bombay Presidency leprosy returns of 1867, examined in 1871 by Henry Vandyke Carter, and the decennial nation-wide population census of 1871-1872, 1881, and 1891, in which the leprosy-affected, among other infirm persons, were also enumerated. The evidence examined includes the investigators' reports and other published and unpublished contemporaneous documents. These censuses were undertaken at a time when the etiology of leprosy was a major controversy, but the evidence here indicates that the efforts to clarify the etiology and estimate the virulence of the disease in India by means of statistics were animated by the desire to justify and embellish pre-conceptions. Despite the claim that they were necessary for leprosy control, the censuses, for various reasons, were not utilized towards that end in India.
In a short review the operative possibilities of peripheral nerve involvement in leprosy concerning pain and paralysis are discussed. External, extraneural and funicular neurolysis, transposition, and treatment of nerve abscess proved to be the methods of choice.
This article deals with a hitherto overlooked aspect of Western medical education in nineteenth-century colonial India, namely the initiation of the early generations of Indian medical students into the principles and practice of 'rational' enquiry. The manner in which recipients of the instruction subsequently demonstrated their entry into the 'rational' world in the field of therapeutics and their responses to the germ theory of disease is explored with respect to four graduates of the Grant Medical College, Bombay. The approach they adopted when confronted with two major issues—treatment and causation-thrown up by leprosy provides the vehicle for the study. It is concluded that Western medicine-trained Indian physicians were not passive receptacles of the received 'rational' wisdom. They interpreted, utilised and exploited it in highly individualistic and revealing ways.
The authors state that the data in these registers ''were never published.'' They are correct in the sense that the entire set of autopsy records for that period has not been published. Yet, it is pertinent to note that the data have been used in considerable part for many other published studies. The authors have entirely overlooked the pioneering work of P. V.
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