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Rod Edmond. Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006. x + 255 pp. Ill. $90.00 (ISBN-10: 0-521-86584-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-521-86584-5).
In Leprosy and Empire, the example of leprosy in the decades between 1840 and 1920 enables the author to consider wide-ranging practices of exclusion, separation, and isolation in different parts of the imperial world and across many colonial territories. Edmond states that his intention is to situate leprosy "within the entangled relations of metropole and colony" (p. 17).
The dawning awareness of the possibility that leprosy threatened to "return" to the heart of empire and the mid- to late nineteenth-century debates about the nature of the disease are the starting points of Edmond's discussion. This discussion centers on the 1867 Report of the Royal College of Physicians and the unremitting, rather dogged but liberal, defense of its findings by the honorary secretary of the College's Leprosy Committee, Gavin Milroy. He held fast to the report's conclusions that leprosy was a hereditary disease not requiring any special conditions of isolation and containment. In the face of the...