Rod Edmond is Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History at the University of Kent. His previous publications include Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (1997), and, as co-editor with Vanessa Smith, Islands in History and Representation (2003).
Introduction; 1. Describing, imagining and defining leprosy 1770-1867; 2.
Scientists discuss the causes of leprosy, and the disease becomes a public
issue in Britain and its empire 1867-98; 3. The fear of degeneration:
leprosy in the tropics and the metropolis at the fin de siecle; 4.
Segregation in the high imperial era: island leper colonies on Hawaii, at
the Cape, in Australia and New Zealand; 5. Concentrating and isolating
racialised others, the diseased and the deviant: the idea of the colony in
the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 6. Writers visiting
leper colonies: Charles Warren Stoddard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack
London, Graham Greene and Paul Theroux; Postscript.
