Leprosy

“Leprosy was capricious. It seemed to resist explanation in terms of geographical and somatic boundaries, or else to practice some inexplicable boundary behavior of its own devising. In this way the new micro-bacterial world of the late nineteenth century was rediscovering in its own terms the ageo-old boundary between life and death.” In the mid-1880s, German leprologist Eduard Arning, investigating leprosy in Hawaii, claimed that the bacillus “seems to multiply in the bodies of dead lepers months after they had been buried. Modern science could thus be seen to augment the traditional idea of the leprous body as a prototypical corpse, and leprosy as a disease that operated across the divide between life and death” (Edmond, 81).