Stephen Snelders, Leprosy and Colonialism

The latest in the ‘Social Histories of Medicine’ series from Manchester University Press, Stephen Snelders’s in-depth monograph on Dutch Suriname makes several key contributions to global scholarship on the leprosy. First, and most importantly, Snelders provides a needed corrective to the historiography concerning how Western science began to see leprosy as a colonial problem. His monograph is one of very few that search for the racialised roots of leprosy discourse as far back as the eighteenth century. In the Caribbean, increasingly reliant on plantation slavery, leprosy was seen as a uniquely African malady. As he righty claims, ‘The first constructions of leprosy as a danger to white dominance transmitted by an “inferior” race, and as a disease similar or identical to biblical and medieval leprosy, began in the Caribbean’ (p.5). In his early chapters on the pre-emancipation era, he refines his reading of rare texts by European physicians in Suriname who wrote about their observations on leprosy, cementing the idea that the disease was contagious and hereditary, and that interracial sexual contact was especially dangerous to the colony’s health. Rules regarding compulsory segregation of leprosy sufferers waxed and waned over the course of the colonial era, as did international medical theories about the risk of contagion—but the fact that the majority of sufferers were Afro-Surinamese (along with a smaller number of Asian migrant labourers or their descendants) meant it remained a feared and stigmatised condition well after Norwegian Dr Gerhard Hansen’s 1873 discovery of the Mycobacterium leprae. (Some readers may have wished Snelders to use the less-charged term ‘Hansen’s Disease’, but as he explains in the first chapter, he uses the term ‘leprosy’ as part and parcel of understanding the term and its historical valences (p.12), rather than taking on the futile task of determining post-facto whether patients actually had been infected by the Mycobacterium leprae or suffered another ailment with similar symptoms.) Snelders also maintains the trend in recent scholarship to look at modern leprosy asylums as more than just instruments of state control and repression, but rather as ‘complex microcosms where the sufferers had agency and everyday life was continuously renegotiated’ (p.219)

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