"An Atmosphere of Leprosy"

Hansen's Disease, the Dependent Body, and the Transoceanic Politics of Hawaiian Annexation

The Hawaiians are a very affable, agreeable, and lovable people just as much so as any other on earth; but in contact with disease, all their desirable traits are seriously discounted by their lack of care, because they endanger all of us "by failing to obey the most simple rules of health, necessary for their own salvation and self-preservation." It is a most pitiable condition, evident to the most unobserving, "that an atmosphere of leprosy clings to and surrounds the unfortunate Hawaiian." Why? Because he fails to realize the danger that menaces him, apart even from the extreme receptivity of his system to the bacillus of leprosy, a condition lacking in other races domiciled in Hawai'i nei: this being an indisputable fact, then he (the Hawaiian) is the weak link in our chain of national health defense.

— ALFRED A. MOURITZ, The Path of the Destroyer: A History of Leprosy in the Hawaiian Islands, 1916

Physician Alfred A. Mouritz, who had served for four years as the resident doctor at the Kalawao Hansen's disease settlement on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i beginning in 1884, published a history of the disease's impact on Hawai'i in 1916. Although the first page of Mouritz's book glosses English translations of the Bible, which in 2 Kings suggests that a skin disease "clings" to the general Naaman and his descendants, Mouritz declares, "Leprosy as a hereditary condition is of doubtful proof." Mycobacterium leprae, at the time called Bacillus leprae, was discovered as the cause of what we today call Hansen's disease in 1873. Still, well into the twentieth century, its mode of transmission, its divergence in severity, and individuals' seemingly random immunity to it made the persistence of leprosy a mystery. How, then, could Mouritz declare that "an atmosphere of leprosy clings to and surrounds the unfortunate Hawaiian"? The answer is a "receptivity" to bacteria that was both physical and moral, an irrational lack of self-care compounded by biological vulnerability. This explanation of how an infectious disease defines a racial "atmosphere" — an affective intensity that defines a group's relation to others in space — is compounded by the main epidemiological finding of the study. The book describes a series of increasingly macabre and unethical experiments Mouritz conducted on patients and at least one kokua (helper or care worker) at the Moloka'i settlement: testing the ability of flies and mosquitoes to contract Hansen's from his patients; holding communal meals and taking samples of patients' chewed or touched food for the presence of bacteria; conducting gynecological exams for sexual transmission; attempting to infect healthy residents or reinfect ill ones; even exhuming the grave of a former patient to extract bacilli from the corpse. Mouritz comes to a conclusion that ends with the title of his study: "The main entry of the Bacillus Leprae into the system of Man is through the mouth and digestive tract, and this is 'the path of the destroyer.'"

The oral opening to the alimentary canal presented an abyss of uncertain connection. Writing at a moment when increasing public knowledge of germ theories of disease advertised the body's physical interface with microscopic bacterial species, Mouritz draws the risk of disease transmission and immunological vulnerability into a racial typology that dominated US medical, journalistic, and literary representations of indigenous Hawaiians. Associating Hawaiians with unsanitary transfer of feces, saliva, and dirt carrying unwanted bacterial species, Mouritz's experimental conclusion regarding an oral pathway for Hansen's disease confirms Parama Roy's assessment that "colonial politics often spoke in an indisputably visceral tongue: its experiments, engagements, and traumas were experienced in the mouth, belly, olfactory organs, and nerve endings, so that the stomach served as a kind of somatic political unconscious." As Hansen's disease literally damages the nerve endings in its advanced stages, Roy's phrasing is particularly apt for capturing Mouritz's triangulation of immune, digestive, and nervous entanglements with microbes. Mouritz trains the settler's fear of disease upon a Hawaiian subject who lacks the proper compass for navigating the environment, the nervous disgust that modern hygiene attaches to putrid smells, the exchange of bodily fluids and wastes, and other transfer points of interspecies contact. In a sense, this absence of affect indicated that even prior to infection, the Hawaiian was always already "anaesthetic," a diagnostic term used in Mouritz's day to describe cases of Hansen's that affected the nerves' proper capacity for feeling.

Like many other tropical medical experts and colonial travelers writing on Hansen's disease at the turn of the twentieth century, Mouritz combined modern tropes of filth, contagion, and animality with a tragic sense of the biblical antiquity of the disease. In asserting the spiritual taint that clings to the colonized and the curse of their inevitable physical isolation once afflicted, such writings actually contributed to a new and intense practice of spatial quarantine of Hansen's disease in an era of colonial tropical medicine. Against the presumption that the isolation of Hansen's disease patients was an unchanging historical practice of abjection, in the late nineteenth century the disease became an intense preoccupation of British and US tropical-medical experts crossing South Africa, India, the Pacific Islands, California, and Louisiana, despite the fact that it is only moderately contagious and slow to progress in the body.

This chapter suggests that sensational representations of native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) susceptibility to the Hansen's disease bacterium, such as Mouritz's, channeled racial fears of colonial movements of labor, commodities, and settlement into an emergent government of species reliant on segregation of the ill. The technique of racial engulfment through quarantine in turn advertised the inevitable biological and political dependency of Hawaiians on the settler institutions of the US occupation. Documenting how such public fears and hopes were conjoined in literary, photographic, and epidemiological depictions of the Hansen's disease settlements on the island of Moloka'i, I suggest that this logic of dread life invoked persistent contrasts between living and dead, primitive and modern, human and animal, and dependent and independent bodies. The interspecies...