The Miasma doctrine – a way of thinking about public health that dominated the Western world from the 1840s to 1870s – viewed diseases like leprosy and cholera as caused by ‘bad air’, and that the solution was to improve environmental sanitation. However, it wasn’t just the disease that was targeted – its sufferers were too. Colonial governments in Australia and Canada labeled people affected by leprosy as ‘unclean’ and used this to justify the stigmatisation of Chinese migrant workers and their exclusion from society.
When leprosy was first recorded in the colony of Queensland, it stoked fears that a White Australia would be corrupted by diseases brought by other races – a morbidly ironic fear given four in five Indigenous Australians died from diseases brought by Europeans, a story all too familiar for the indo-pacific region. Leprosy represented contamination from the Other and threatened the ‘racial purity’ of a ‘vulnerable White Australia. It seems that it wasn’t coincidental that people affected by leprosy were sent to Dayman island, a place that’s ‘about as far north as it is possible to get from the mainland without actually being in New Guinea’. On Dayman Island, sick men were sent to live in grass huts without medical attention, which led to rapid deaths.
The year after leprosy ‘patients’ were incarcerated and deported, Brisbane had its own ‘Kristallknact’ or pogrom, as termed by Ray Evans, where anti-Chinese riots led to fears of a possible race war. Perhaps the fear of a Chinese colony in the north of Australia made deporting sick Chinese people to the remote island more acceptable to some in Australia at the time.
Dr Salter who was responsible for the region wrote in May 1891
“The people at Dayman Island are lepers, they are mostly Chinese, notwithstanding these two qualities, however, they are also human beings, I pray this latter quality may not be forgotten”
Legislation was passed in 1891 in New South Wales to allow people affected by leprosy to be deported in effort to preserve Australia’s ‘purity’ as an ‘immediate solution’ for dealing with ‘material evidence of decay and degeneration’. For resident surgeon Joseph Bancroft in Queensland, leprosy could only be spread by ‘others’ – Chinese immigrants, Polynesian labourers – but not by White people. He was ‘puzzled’ when three cases in North Queensland occurred when ‘no special communication happened between them and Chinamen, except the purchase of vegetables’.
The Legislative Assembly’s Hansard from 1892 – still available on the Queensland government’s website records more of Dr Salter’s protest:
“I take this opportunity to express my utter disapproval of the present leper station at Dayman Island. The death rate among these men has been enormous.”
Leprosy loomed large in the colonial imagination as a foreign disease – one which needed to be controlled by segregation, repression and stigmatisation in order to not threaten colonial projects like the Dutch West Indies Company in Suriname. With over 33,000 slaves in Suriname by 1754, European plantation owners in close proximity to African slaves raised questions about possible transmission originating from the non-white communities. Leprosy ‘came to be seen as a symbol of the African threat to Europeans’ according to Snelders.
In Suriname, ‘profits would be seriously at risk’ if medical intervention didn’t take place, so healthy people were told to stay away from sufferers, to not enter their homes, to not touch them nor even breathe the same air. A 1761 law prevented people with leprosy from using public roads and barred surgeons from providing medical treatment in cities – the surgeons would have to head out to the villages instead. Racist beliefs about leprosy and the rights (or lack thereof) of 33,000 slaves enabled some of the most severe forms of institutionally endorsed leprosy-related discrimination.
Leprosy stigma and racism have a long, shared, and ugly history – even in Australia. Harmony Day is an important reminder that stigma against people with leprosy was not just a problem for ‘other countries’, but that it has a history here as well.
