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"Countering Fears of Corruption: 'Leprosy' and Healing in the Early Caribbean," by Kristen Block

Kristen Block, Associate Professor, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

What happens to social bonds when individuals face lingering, disfiguring illnesses? Europeans in the 17th-18th century increasingly believed leprosy to be a resurgent disease brought to the Caribbean with the slave trade, potentially polluting the colonial project. While colonial medical professionals racialized and sexualized the origins of the multi-symptom, disfiguring skin conditions under the label leprosy,  many among the multiracial group of Caribbean "lepers" pushed back against the narratives of social corruption and stigma that accompanied their conditions.  By interpreting their symptoms in other terms, they sought both social consolation for their afflictions and the hope for a cure.

Author of Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2012.