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Author: Tony Gould
ISBN : 0312305028
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This fascinating cultural and medical history of leprosy enriches our understanding of a still-feared biblical disease.
It is a condition shrouded for centuries in mystery, legend, and religious fanaticism. Societies the world over have vilified its sufferers: by the sheer accident of mycobacterial infection, they have been condemned to exile and imprisonment—illness itself considered evidence of moral taint.
Over the last 200 years, the story of leprosy has witnessed dramatic reversals in terms of both scientific theory and public opinion. In A DISEASE APART, Tony Gould traces the history of this compelling period through the lives of individual men and women: intrepid doctors, researchers, and missionaries, and a vast spectrum of patients.
We meet such pioneers of treatment as the Norwegian microbe hunter, Armauer Hansen. Though Hansen discovered the leprosy bacillus in l873, the 'heredity vs. contagion' debate raged on for decades. Meanwhile, across the world, Belgian Catholic missionary Father Damien became an international celebrity tending to his stricken flock at the Hawaiian settlement of Molokai. He contracted the disease himself. To the British, leprosy posed an "imperial danger" to their sprawling colonial system. In the l920s Sir Leonard Rogers of the Indian Medical Service found that the ancient Hindu treatment of chaulmoogra oil could be used in an injectable form.
The Cajun bayou saw the inspiring rise of leprosy’s most zealous campaigner of all: a patient. At Carville, Louisiana, a Jewish Texan pharmacist named Stanley Stein was transformed by leprosy into an eloquent editor and writer. He ultimately became a thorn in the side of the U.S. Public Heath Department and a close friend of Tallulah Bankhead.
The personalities met on this journey are remarkable and their stories unfold against the backgrounds of Norway, Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan, South Africa, Canada, Nigeria, Nepal and Louisiana. Although since the l950s drugs treatments have been able to cure cases caught early—and arrest advanced cases—leprosy remains a subject mired in ignorance.
In this superb and enlightened book, Tony Gould throws light into the shadows.
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- Hardcover: 432 pages
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (August 25, 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312305028
- ISBN-13: 978-0312305024
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
Free Download A Disease Apart: Leprosy in the Modern World
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.
In A Disease Apart, Tony Gould describes the history of leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, over the past 200 years, with a focus on the devastating effects of the disease, the often inhumane conditions in which people infected with Mycobacterium leprae were forced to live, and selected missionaries, physicians and especially patients themselves whose efforts led to improved care and living conditions for people afflicted with leprosy worldwide.
Leprosy has been a feared illness since antiquity, due to the havoc it wreaks upon the body. Unlike infections or illnesses that ravage internal organs, such as its closely related cousin tuberculosis, which is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, leprosy preferentially infects cooler parts of the body, particularly as the fingers, toes, eyes, nose and testes. The immune system's response to the infection often leads to an intense inflammatory response, which causes severe damage to the superficial nerves in these areas, leading to peripheral neuropathy. As a result, the afflicted person progressively loses sensation in these areas, which ultimately leads to tissue breakdown, ulceration and bacterial superinfection, followed by the loss of fingers and toes, destruction of the structure of the nose, and, in some cases, blindness.
Leprosy remains the most common infection that leads to disability, and its elimination has proven to be difficult, with nearly 250,000 new cases worldwide annually, including approximately 100 new cases in the United States each year.
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