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Customer Reviews (2)

Leprosy: not just a bygone disease
Hear the world 'leprosy' and you tend to think of bygone eras and diseases no longer threatening modern societies - but A DISEASE APART: LEPROSY IN THE MODERN WORLD shows otherwise, tracing the history of leprosy and surveying the legends, realities, and medical concerns surrounding the disease. From pioneers of early treatments and diagnosis to local epidemics of leprosy, chapters survey the controversies, research, and health risks which have surrounded leprosy. Treatments for cases caught early have been in effect since the 1950s - but there's still lots of misunderstanding and myth surrounding leprosy - and thus the need for this detailed medical history.

A Special Disease
Everyone knows what you mean if you refer to someone as a leper: someone others shun.There are worse diseases, more painful ones, more numerous ones, and many more contagious ones, but leprosy was a horror of its own.This was largely because leprosy was visible; blotchy skin, bloated face, extremities dissolving away.Lepers had more problems in that they lost their sight, but more particularly they lost their sense of touch, and with it the capacity to feel pain, the blessing in disguise that protects us from the world's blows.It is a terrible disease, but the horror it inspired in others made it unique.In _A Disease Apart: Leprosy in the Modern World_ (St. Martin's Press), Tony Gould shows that in the past couple of hundred years, the disease has lost its capacity to shock.It still exists, but there are good treatments and we know that sufferers need not be objects of fear or horror, and that they are certainly not victims of some sort of curse from gods of any type.Gould has not pointedly drawn comparisons to AIDS in our own time, but the similar arc of social reaction to the disease is clear.

Much of what people know about leprosy comes from the Bible, and it certainly inspired the missionaries in their efforts against the disease, but probably those missionaries were fighting a different one than that known in Old Testament times and locales.The involvement of Christianity by means of missionaries to sufferers is a theme throughout this book.One victim himself wrote, "There is no mission to the tubercular, no mission to the diabetics, no mission to syphilitics.... there seems to be some special reward for working with 'lepers'."Such missions are not now fashionable, and we know missionaries are not an unalloyed force for good.Gould has focused in on one region after another to tell histories that all include the cruel management of sufferers and the eventual freeing of them to more enlightened ways.Perhaps the most famous is Father Damien, the Belgian priest who ministered to lepers in Hawaii from 1873 to his death from leprosy in 1889.An American Protestant missionary met him there, and wrote a private posthumous letter critical of Father Damien ("He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.") which the recipient published.Damien's cause was taken up by another previous visitor to Molokai, none other than Robert Louis Stevenson.The controversy only swelled interest in the colony and made Damien a martyr and a figurehead for fundraising.

Leper colonies were not only in far away, impoverished places full of people with dark skin.The American version was in a lovely place, if a little swampy, called Carville, Louisiana.Huge oaks, songbirds, and gorgeous flowering trees made it a place of inspiring natural beauty."It should have been a tonic to the soul.Except that we were fenced in."So wrote Stanley Stein, a Jewish pharmacist from Texas who edited the patients' publication _The Star_.He was the bane of the U.S. Public Health Service, always campaigning in a spirited American fashion for more rights.The campaign worked, as gradually patients were allowed more time on the outside, and the fences that had held them were taken down.Stein became a star himself, touring the country and hobnobbing with the likes of Tallulah Bankhead.He died in 1967, but Carville still exists as does his paper.The facility was formally closed as a leprosarium in 1999, but some with the disease still live there; having been isolated all their lives, they fear trying to live in the outside world, although they could do so with which much less stigma due to Stein's campaign.Gould shows that this has been the pattern in one locale after another as scientific evaluation of leprosy as a disease has shown that it isn't anything more than a disease, and not a very dangerous one at that, especially now.There is a contradiction, though, in that sufferers and healers who insist that it is just a disease are taking away its special status.The special status may have been founded on fear, but take it away and the focus on treatment and rehabilitation may be lost, especially in poor countries with other diseases to fight.It is one of the many paradoxes in an engaging and moving book. ... Read more

Book Description

While premodern poets and preachers viewed leprosy as a "disease of the soul," physicians in the period understood it to be a "cancer of the whole body." In this innovative study, medical historian Luke Demaitre explores medical and social perspectives on leprosy at a time when judicious diagnosis could spare healthy people from social ostracization and help the afflicted get a license to beg.

Extending his inquiry from the first century to late in the eighteenth century, Demaitre draws on translations of academic treatises and archival records to illuminate the professional standing, knowledge, and conduct of the practitioners who struggled to move popular perceptions of leprosy beyond loathing and pity. He finds that, while not immune to social and cultural perceptions of the leprous as degenerate, and while influenced by their own fears of contagion, premodern physicians moderated society's reactions to leprosy and were dedicated to the well-being of their patients.

Book Description
Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease which affects the skin and nerves. Although cases of leprosy are decreasing, thousands of new cases are still reported every year.This book explores the history of leprosy, its affect on the people who contract it, how it is spread and how it is treated. ... Read more

Book Description
An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the believed spread of leprosy. Across the empire this involved isolating victims of the disease in 'colonies', often on offshore islands. Discussion of the segregation of lepers is then extended to analogous examples of this practice, which, it is argued, has been an essential part of the repertoire of colonialism in the modern period. The book also examines literary representations of leprosy in Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century writing, and concludes with a discussion of traveller-writers such as R. L. Stevenson and Graham Greene who described and fictionalised their experience of staying in a leper colony. ... Read more

Book Description
Mysterious and misunderstood, distorted by biblical imagery of disfigurement and uncleanness, Hansen's disease (or leprosy) has all but disappeared from America's consciousness. In Carville, Louisiana, the closed doors of the nation's last center for the treatment of leprosy hold stories of sadness, separation, and even strength in the face of what was once a life-wrenching diagnosis.

Drawn from interviews with living patients and extensive research in the leprosarium's archives, "Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America" tells the stories of former patients at the National Hansen's Disease Center. For over a century, from 1894 until 1999, Carville was the site of the only in-patient hospital in the continental United States for the treatment of Hansen's disease, which is the preferred designation for leprosy.

Patients --- exiled there by law for treatment and for separation from the rest of society --- reveal how they were able to cope with the devastating blow the diagnosis of leprosy dealt them. Leprosy was so frightening and so poorly understood that entire families would suffer and be shunned if one family member contracted the disease. When patients entered Carville, they typically left everything behind, including their legal names and their hopes for the future.

Former patients at Carville give their views of the outside world and of the culture they forged within the treatment center, which included married and individual living quarters, a bar, and even a jail. Those quarantined in the leprosarium created their own Mardi Gras celebrations, their own newspaper, and their own body of honored stories in which fellow sufferers of Hansen's disease prevailed over trauma and ostracism. Through their memories and stories, we see their very human quest for identity and endurance with dignity, humor, and grace. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Fascinating
With a natural wonder for all things morbid and the inner lives of people that struggle, I was curious to know the details about leprosy as a disease and also about the personal details of the people that suffered with it.This book gave enough scientific facts about the disease to quench my curiousity, and also managed to give a personal perspective, delving into the details of the lives of, and even quoting, victims of the disease that lived when leprosy was still misunderstood greatly.I read the entire book, then ordered, "The Colony", a book about a leper colony that existed on an island in Hawaii.I found that book very dry, as it traced the character's lives very factually.It was so much like a history book that I couldn't even make it quite half way through.

Not comprehensive but it's a small book
I have been aware of the Carville facility since I read Betty Martin's "Miracle at Carville" as a child, and was delighted to learn about 10 years ago that at that time, she was still living.The book was very respectful of her privacy, not revealing her real name even though she died in 2002.

It was a superficial history of the facility and its newsletter, "The Star", which probably did more to promote knowledge about this interesting disease than anything else.

A Disappointment

Gaudet's book fails to tell us very much about the day to day lives of Carville's patients. Granted, she does relate stories about the Mardi Gras parade and about sneaking off the grounds (I was surprised by the largely positive reactions of the outside community). But time after time, I would read a passage and want to know more. After finishing the book, I hardly had any more knowledge about Hansen's Disease and the Carville experience than I had before I began reading it.

reflecting on carville
This book deserves a more intensive review than this, but it also deserves to be read,so I will at least share some random reflections on it.Carville is the name of a small community in south Louisiana.It is also a euphemism for the location of the hospital that for more than 100 years treatedpatients with leprosy (preferably called Hansen'sdisease.)As such Carville was a place of mystery and curiosity.Marcia Gaudet's new book ofrecollections takes the mystery out of the place and shows it to be the home of an intensely courageous group of people, stigmatized for their condition but never defeated.The book which has much to offer to the scholar and the lay reader alike records the memories of trauma and grief that Hansen'sdisease patients endured.But the book does not stop with trauma.It relates the formation and growth of a community with its own traditions (escaping through the hole in the fence),celebrations (Mardi Gras) and tall tales.For anyone with even a casual interest in the lives of people in intensely painful situations the book is an inspiration and a must read. ... Read more

Product Description
A humorous look at parenting up a baby ... Read more

Book Description
By comparing institutions in Hawai'i and Louisiana designed to incarcerate individuals with a highly stigmatized disease, Colonizing Leprosy provides an innovative study of the complex relationship between U.S. imperialism and public health policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the Kalaupapa Settlement in Moloka'i and the U.S. National Leprosarium in Carville, Michelle Moran shows not only how public health policy emerged as a tool of empire in America's colonies, but also how imperial ideologies and racial attitudes shaped practices at home. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Should be a must-read
If you are interested in being a doctor, or if you are suffering
from pain this book can be invaluable.
I am neither a doctor, nor suffering from pain, but I thoroughly
enjoyed the autobiography of this surgeon.
I can't recommend this book enough. ... Read more

Book Description
Set firmly in the medical, religious and cultural milieu of the European Middle Ages, this book is the first serious academic studyof a disease surrounded by misconceptions and prejudices. Even specialists will be surprised to learn that most of our stereotyped ideas about the segregation of medieval lepers originated in the nineteenth century; that leprosy excited a vast range of responses, from admiration to revulsion; that in the later Middle Ages it was diagnosed readily even by laity; that a wide range of treatment was available, that medieval leper hospitals were no more austere than the monasteries on which they were modelled; that the decline of leprosy was not monocausal but implied a complex web of factors - medical, environmental, social and legal. Carole Rawcliffe writes with consummate skill, subtlety and rigour; her book will change forever the image of the medieval leper. CAROLE RAWCLIFFE is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. ... Read more

Book Description
"The sand beach that stretches nearly a mile beyond the[Kalaupapa] wharf was always laid smooth by the tide.Hansen's diseaseplays havoc with feet, ulcerating them, crippling them.Such feet walkpoorly.And in sand they cannot walk at all..."

When Henry Nalaielua was diagnosed with Hansen's disease in 1936 and takenfrom his home and family, he began a journey of exile that led him toKalaupapa--the remote settlement with the tragic history on the Hawaiianisland of Moloka'i.This is Henry's story--an unforgettable memoir of theboy who grew to build a full and joyous life at Kalaupapa, and still callsit home today. No Footprints in the Sand is one of only a few memoirs evershared with the public by a Kalaupapa patient. Its intimacy and candor makeit, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin, "a rare andprecious human document." Nalaielua's story is an inspiring one; despiteexile, physical challenges and the severing of family ties, he has facedlife -- as an artist, musician and historian -- with courage, honesty, hopeand humor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

true stories
we loved this story I didn't not realize there was a history on these
people. and it was done so well I would recommend you read Malaki first
then this book after. good read

Wonderful, rare story. Illuminating
Aloha kakou,
Outstanding collaborative effort by two very important Native Hawaiian voices. This wonderful portrait details a man`s life spent well--dealing with the challenges and trials of surviving Hansen`s disease in Kalaupapa, Moloka`i. Not an in depth about Hansen`s or Kalaupapa, this is Henry`s story, his life, loves, talents and legacy. Henry tells his story, through Sally-Jo`s sensitive handling, with the self effacing, off hand manner of a true local Bruddah. Typical of Hawaiians of his generation, he can do a handful of difficult things really well. This celebration of a life lived with purpose also shows what can result from a life lived purposefully with Aloha. I strongly recommend this book.

Hope and courage in adversity
Reviewed by Richard R. Blake for Reader Views (3/07)

This is an amazing story.It is Henry's story.Henry Nalielua, diagnosed with Hansen's disease at the age of ten, was branded leprous."No Footprints in the Sand" is an important memoir.It tells of the journey that took Henry from a sugar plantation community on the Island of Hawaii to Kalaupapa, a remote settlement on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.

Nalaielua's story is inspiring.Even in exile, with lifelong medical and physical challenges and isolation from his family, he faced life with hope, perseverance, courage, and humor.Henry learned to draw and paint. He became an artist.Henry loved music and mastered the ukulele and upright bass.He became a musician. Henry's mind was sharp.He was determined and quick-to-learn. He became an historian. Henry has also served on numerous public agency advisory boards. When the facility at Kalaupapa was named a National Historic Park, Henry became a guide for park visitors.He still resides at Kalaupapa

Co-author Sally-Jo Bowman worked determinedly over a period of years to help bring Henry's story to publication. She first met Henry in 1995, when he helped her with on-site research at Kaluapapa for several magazine articles about the Hansen's disease colony.

Henry's story is unforgettable.It is told with intimacy and openness."No Footprints in the Sand" is a heartwarming memoir that will inspire anyone facing adversity, long term illness, or needing encouragement.This was a very positive reading experience.

It stirred emotions in the same way as Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist"
In his powerful first book, "Uncle Henry" Nalaielua tells a story that has rarely been told, of a dark moment of Hawai'i's history; not from the distant viewpoint of the historian, but from the first-person testimony of its survivor.

With honesty, humor and vivid detail, Henry's courageous tale touched my soul, so profoundly, that I kept wanting to know more.I couldn't put it down and finished it in one sitting, wishing that it wouldn't end.It stirred emotions in the same way as Paulo Coelho's, "The Alchemist," in its message of following one's dream, despite all obstacles. (Except, this is no fable; it is a real life piece.)

Along with his brilliant co-author, Sally-Jo Bowman, he weaves an intimate story of strength and perserverence, which will surely be known for decades to come as one of the islands' finest mo`olelo.

This is a must read for everyone and makes for a wonderful gift.It will touch you in surprising ways, and make you want to meet this incredible man and the spiritual place that he would finally call, "home."

Henry, a rascal, can-do kanaka (Hawaiian man)
I've now given away so many copies of No Footprints that I should have bought a dozen or twenty at wholesale. Henry's is an amazing story of a kolohe kanaka - naughty Hawaiian - who had the misfortune to contract a dreaded disease in 1936. Sally-Jo Bowman's input makes it a fascinating read.Sounds just like Henry sat down and wrote it all by himself, but we know it doesn't work that way. I chuckled at Henry's can-do attitude. Man after my own heart. I'm glad the book includes all his Casanova events. What a guy, a real renaissance kanaka kane - Hawaiian man. Great title! ... Read more

Product Description
This is a workbook and its purpose is to provide you with check lists of 30 important tasks relating to the care of leprosy patients. By using these lists, both you and your supervisor can assess your progress during training. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
An interdisciplinary compilation of work on the response of the peripheral nerve to infection, with leprosy as a model. It focuses on recent advances in the field. Practical description of techniques would be very useful to students of neurobiology/neurosciences. ... Read more

Book Description
“Two Hearts, One Fire” is an eminently readable collection of human interest accounts, often amusing, and sometimes poignant, of life in Jamaica, British West Indies, from the hitherto unpublished collections of an Army Medic, and the heart-to-heart experiences of a missionary Sister with her leprosy patients, as gleaned from the letters of the Nun to her community back home in the United States. Neither the Sergeant nor the Nun had any idea that their brief encounters at the old Leper's Home had any particular significance for the future, or even that their paths would cross again. The war over, the Sergeant, looking for help in the fulfillment of a promise he had made to himself to provide personally-inscribed gifts at Christmas for the leprosy patients he could not forget, rallied his family and friends to the cause.

Seeking advice, he decided to visit the Massachusetts headquarters of the Marist Missionary Sisters who staffed the leprosarium in Jamaica. There he again encountered the Nun who was back home for medical attention. She was allowed to help him in his project -- a joining of efforts which today flourishes as the Damien-Dutton Society for Leprosy Aid.

As the Society's horizons expanded, so did its membership and its world recognition. Five decades later it was not only “two hearts, one fire” but thousands upon thousands of generous hearts afire with the need to alert the public to the unique problem of a much maligned, much misunderstood leprosy affliction, known today as Hansen's Disease. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This one's a keeper!
I love this book.It reads well and just what the Holy Spirit guided me to read.Actually I am still in the process of reading it - but I know it is going to be good to the end.It takes place in Jamaica and I find it fascinating to read about that too. Not a heavy book - just a nice quiet read that picks you up. ... Read more