Leprosy Mailing List – August 10, 2025
Ref.: (LML) New book: Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World
From: Magnus Vollset, Bergen, Norway
Dear Pieter, friends
I wish to draw your attention to a recent book: "Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World" by Oliver Basciano. It features chapters from UK, Norway, USA, Russia, South Africa, Romania, Mozambique, Brazil and Japan, both historical and contemporary, and has received very positive reviews. I asked the author to write a presentation for LML, and this is what he wrote:
"In 2018 a right-wing talking head appeared on Fox News in the US to decry the level of immigration over the southern border to Mexico. This former ICE officer bemoaned that some of these migrants carried 'leprosy and TB that are gonna infect our people in the United States'. It was nonsense of course, but this fear mongering pulled me up short: he had chosen leprosy precisely because of the nightmarish mythology attached to the disease throughout so much of the western world.
This was the catalyst for my book Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World, newly published by Faber in the UK and available through Graywolf in the US next year; a book for a general audience that looks at how the 19th century colonial projects led to the stigmatisation of the disease and meeting some of the hundreds of thousands of those who lived with the consequences.
Working with patients and activists – from MORHAN in Brazil and Zen-Ryo-Kyo in Japan to The Leprosy Mission and ALEMO in Mozambique – I wanted to record not just the traumas of forced incarceration and the fallout from diagnosis, and map how leprosy stigma has provided the 'blueprint' for other forms of discrimination, but also portray the struggle for patient agency and the remarkable solidarity and community building the disease is capable of conjuring. I'm very happy that the book has been very well received in the UK, being reviewed in many of the major newspapers and featured on BBC Radio, and hope that it in some way helps many of those still living with the effects of ignorance internationally."
I hope this is of interest to the LML readers.
All best,
Magnus
Magnus Vollset
Associate Professpr
IGS
Universitetet i Bergen
Tlf: +47 55 58 91 91
uib.no/en/persons/Magnus.Vollset
___________________________________________________________________________
LML - S Deepak, B Naafs, S Noto and P Schreuder
LML blog link: http://leprosymailinglist.blogspot.it/
Contact: Dr Pieter Schreuder << editorlml@gmail.com
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Leprosy Mailing List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leprosymailinglist+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leprosymailinglist/9b06a843-afb6-4049-88d1-61bd0c647b33n%40googlegroups.com.
