Title
The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai
Author
Publication Information
Simon & Schuster: 2006
318 pages
Reason for Reading
I was thinking about doing a paper on the quarantining of people living with HIV/AIDS for a class last fall (which ended up changing to something completely different). While I was doing some background research on the topic, I happened upon some information related to a leper colony (aka Hansen's Disease) in Hawaii that was enforced for over 100 years ending in 1969. The story intrigued me and I started reading this book over the semester break last Christmas. I didn't finish it when the semester started, so I re-read it this summer.
Synopsis
The book details the entire history of the colony on the island of Moloka'i, located on the island between Oahu and Maui. Throughout this time, it details the key people involved in the formation and maintenance of the colony, as well as notable people living in the colony itself. The most famous of these appears to be Father Damien, who essentially became known worldwide as the healthy white man who ventured to live alongside the lepers to do God's work, for which he was eventually honored as a saint. He follows through the end of the colony's official status as a place of exile and through the early 2000's when a few remaining exiles still maintained residence on the island.
Review
I very much enjoyed the book. Writing the history of something like this could prove difficult to write in a manner that doesn't occasionally get bogged down in details, but I never found that to be the case. The author made it quite easy to keep track of the figures he decided to include in the history so the book is a relatively fast read.
Quotes
"For 103 years, beginning in 1866, the Hawaiian and then American governments forcibly removed more than eight thousand people to a remote and inaccessible peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, and into one of the largest leper colonies in the world. The governments did so in the earnest belief that leprosy was rampantly contagious, that isolation was the only effective means of controlling the disease, and that every person it banished actually suffered from leprosy and was thus a hopeless case. On all three counts, they were wrong." (1)
"Hawaiians of the era had several descriptive phrases for leprosy, but perhaps the most apt was 'the sickness that is a crime.' " (8)
"Although Leviticus contains no explicit moral diagnosis, scholars have determined that priests likely viewed any skin disorder as a sign that someone had offended God, and had been punished with a sinful mark. In the context of the Bible, this blurring of boundaries between medical and ethical diagnoses had one critical consequence: almost all skin conditions became stigmatized." (97)
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