Browsing by Subject "Leprosy"
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Item An annotated translation of chapter 7 of the Carakasamhita Citiksasthana : leprosy and other skin disorders(2014-05) Gallagher, Robert Joseph; Davis, Donald R. (Donald Richard), 1970-The Carakasaṃhitā is an early Sanskrit text in the field of āyurvedic medicine. The Cikitsāsthāna is a section of that text dealing with treatments of various maladies, and Chapter 7 of this section discusses skin diseases. Most of the chapter describes symptoms and treatments for a disease which is called kuṣṭha in Sanskrit, and a smaller section is concerned with the diseases of kilaśa and śvitra. An attempt will be made, through the translation and interpretation of the chapter’s 180 verses (ślokas) and their commentaries, to provide definitions of these terms, and to explore their relationship to the disease of leprosy. A discussion of different conceptualizations of leprosy in various cultures and time-periods will also be presented.Item “Coping with this scourge” : the state, leprosy, and the politics of public health in colonial Ghana, 1900-mid 1950s(2015-05) Gundona, Sylvester; Falola, Toyin; Walker, Juliet E. K.; Zamora, Emilio; Denbow, James R.; Ogbomo, Onaiwu W.The dissertation explores the politics of aspects of public health policy in colonial Ghana from 1900 to the mid-1950s. It explains why leprosy a highly debilitating disease condition, did not receive any serious attention by the Gold Coast colonial and medical authorities, but diseases like yaws and trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) did, although the three diseases generally afflicted people of the same geographical location, and did not wreck any havoc on the European population. I implicitly challenge the interpretations of scholars who frame the argument, based on the notion of conceptualizing Africa’s disease environment as an anathema to European imperialism and colonization, that colonial public health policy was driven by how the African disease environment affected the lives of both official and non-official Europeans in the colonies. I argue that the thinking of the Gold Coast colonial and medical authorities on the disease environment was not a static one. By the mid-1930s the disease was conceptualized as an exploitable resource. Medical and pharmaceutical research became important, as were markets for pharmaceutical products. The welfare of the colonial economy, which was labor driven was at play and so was the cultural image of the superiority of anything European. Leprosy was not an appropriate disease for experiment purposes and because the healing process of lepers who were treated by European medication was not spontaneous it challenged the notions of cultural and material superiority being bandied around. Leprosy did not also affect the labor pool of the cocoa and mineral industries. Leprosy was essentially abandoned for trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) and yaws which threatened not just the numbers, but also the quality of labor pool for the cocoa and mineral industries. The two disease offered appropriate avenues for extensive medical and pharmaceutical research. The trial medications deployed showed spontaneous improvement on patients and that bolstered both the notions of medical and cultural superiority and the urge for western pharmacopeia. To ensure the full exploitation of this emerging pharmaceutical market, colonial government was relentless in suffocating the professions of African herbal practitioners.Item Leprosy and social exclusion in Italo Calvino’s Il visconte dimezzato and Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa(2011-05) Marcin, Sarah Elizabeth; Raffa, Guy P.; Biow, DouglasThe leper is the ultimate symbol of the social outcast. Plagued by connotations of not just contagion but of sinfulness and moral depravity, lepers have long been stigmatized and excluded from society. The Hebrew Bible declared them to be unclean, and their influence was believed to be wholly corrupting, as if their physical deformities were an external sign of their defiled souls. In the Middle Ages, those diagnosed with leprosy were made to undergo a particularly severe ritual that closely resembled the office of the dead, making them effectively dead to the world. They were then isolated from the healthy population in leprosariums, and their movements and behaviors were strictly controlled. However, their exclusion can be seen as serving a larger purpose than just the protection of normal society from infection in that it can be used by those in power as a mechanism of social control. The imputation of danger to undesirable persons of a given community ensures that they will be duly feared and ostracized. It is within this context that Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco make use of the idea of the leper as a social outlier in their novels, Il visconte dimezzato and Il nome della rosa, as a way to critique certain processes of exclusion, namely the construction and stigmatization of a social “other” as a means of maintaining social order. This report draws on the historical and literary treatments of the leper to discuss the ways in which Calvino and Eco successfully employ the image of the leper to represent the machinery of exclusion and to shed light on the continued marginalization of outcast groups down to the present day.