The Living Death: Leprosy in the Continental United States, 1871–1921

My paper examines several sites around the mainland United States where public health authorities forcibly isolated leprosy sufferers around the turn of the twentieth century, from remote care facilities in Massachusetts and Louisiana to vacant lots and crowded hospitals in cities like San Francisco, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. Without federal guidance and often lacking any significant firsthand experience with the disease, state and local officials turned tents, islands, and pesthouses into spaces of indefinite quarantine for the few cases that occasionally emerged, citing fear of contagion and the biblical stigma attached to leprosy. At the same time, popular impressions of leprosy had also been shaped by half a century of missionary outreach and racialized depictions of poor “lepers” deserving of sympathy throughout Asia and the Pacific Islands. Using historical newspapers, medical journals, public health reports, and church and missionary records, my paper explores how these sites of disease across the continent simultaneously repulsed and attracted Americans. Leprosy made such spaces “forbidden” on the basis of public health—especially as cases were typically located in “foreign” bodies—but alluring to white missionaries and churchgoers who saw themselves as saviors of heathen bodies and souls. In an era of territorial expansion and evolving colonial relationships, clashing ideas about how the state ought to manage people diagnosed with leprosy on the mainland refined twentieth-century notions of federal responsibility, jurisdiction, and civil liberties. My project ultimately traces the diverse spaces where leprosy existed around the country in the decades leading up to the 1921 opening of the U.S. National Leprosarium in Louisiana.