MSc in History of Science, Medicine & Technology. (360G-Wellcome-084062_Z_07_Z)

e leprosy in colonial Africa, and the way in which African leprosy settlements were created not only to control and eradicate leprosy, but also with the intention of forming miniature African communities that reflected a European ideal of the integration of "traditional" African society with modern and "civilized" European custom. I am specifically interested in the history of colonial medicine, for I believe the experience and perception of disease in Africa by Europeans was an integral part of the European conceptualization of both Africa and its inhabitants. I came to this conclusion as I researched a paper on the way that European ideas of race, sexuality, and morality influenced different constructions of disease and its experience for themselves and for Africans. I am also interested in the shifting perceptions of leprosy over time, and particularly in the way that the leprosy of the Bible and the leprosy of medieval Europe were interpreted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leprosy was often considered to be the most terrible disease that afflicted humanity, and I would like to explore the factors that contributed to its infamy. Did people fear leprosy for its visible and degrading symptoms? Were leprosy patients stigmatized because their disease was associated with biblical leprosy? Or was the identity created for African lepers a product of the desire of colonizing Europeans to distance themselves from a medieval past in which they had experienced leprosy? I believe each of these factors are important to the formation of a stigma against leprosy, and it is this interaction between Christian tradition and the actual experience of leprosy that I would like to explore.