Hidden Lives, Concealed Narratives: A History of Leprosy in the Philippines ed. by Maria Serena I. Diokno (review)

Leprosy, or Hansen's disease, has attracted scholarly inquiry for a number of right reasons. For one, scholars can examine the ways by which societies and regimes of power have made sense of a disease that has caused mass suffering in different places at different times. While it is now known that the microbe Mycobacterium leprae causes leprosy, the disease's longevity had allowed it to gain various cultural meanings in the past, ranging from its Judeo-Christian association with impurity and sin to miasmatic interpretations to its association with lewd behavior and lack of hygiene—notions that are general knowledge in the literature. In the Philippines the history of leprosy has inspired scholarship, from Enrico Azicate's MA thesis, "Medicine in the Philippines: An Historical Perspective" (University of the Philippines, 1989) to Warwick Anderson's "Leprosy and Citizenship" (positions 1998:707–30). Yet, there are more stories to tell. Enriching the literature is the book Hidden Lives, Concealed Narratives: A History of Leprosy in the Philippines, commissioned by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) and edited by Maria Serena Diokno, professor of history at the University of the Philippines-Diliman and former NHCP chairperson. With Diokno are esteemed Filipino scholars, mostly historians, who authored the chapter essays. Marshalling materials that include missionary documents, travelogues, materia medica, health journals, as well as oral testimonies, the book retells Philippine history through the lens of the history of leprosy.

Hidden Lives, Concealed Narratives is composed of three parts that are organized chronologically. Part 1 looks into the precolonial and Spanish colonial periods, during which a constellation of skin afflictions that had appeared in indigenous nosologies eventually came together under the medicalized Spanish term lepra. In a context where no clinical therapy was yet present, these different skin ailments elicited traditional herbal compounds and healing techniques. The advent of Spanish colonialism marked the increasing prominence of Catholic relief work, which offered palliative care to those afflicted with these diseases and sought to convert them to Christianity. Part 2 examines the American colonial period, during which leprosy became a biosocial concern visible to an invasive colonial state. During this period, control measures comprised mostly of medicocarceral approaches, primarily the rounding up and detention of leprosy sufferers, who were then ferried off to the island of Culion, Palawan. Part 3 traces the evolution of leprosy control from the medico-carceral approach to a rehabilitative approach at a time when effective clinical therapies were emerging and global practice was veering away from methods of seclusion and isolation. This shift took place roughly from the late American colonial period through the postcolonial/republican period. In the book's last part, the authors deliberately abandon the use of "leprosy" to employ the less derisive and more politically correct "Hansen's disease." The book closes with two ethnographic studies based on recent secondary materials and oral interviews among residents of what was then the Culion Leper Colony.

A number of gems make some chapter essays a delight to read. In Lorelei de Viana's chapter, a Spanish missionary's description of a Visayan treatment practice—whereby the afflicted was made to sit inside a hole covered with dry leaves and moist earth—resembled the Javanese mystical practice called tapa pendem, thus linking Visayan healing systems to other places in precolonial Southeast Asia (29). In Francis Gealogo and Antonio Galang's chapter, Jesuit accounts of a series of events in 1930s Culion show a most interesting case of active patient agency when gangs of male inmates broke into the women's dormitory, took away their girlfriends, and burned the place down (172–73). This chapter also tells of a humorous yet tragic case of baby-switching probably committed by Victor Heiser, who was aboard a ship en route to Manila sometime during the early years of the Culion colony, in tow with healthy newly born...