Leprosy and Colonialism: Suriname Under Dutch Rule, 1750–1950 by Stephen Snelders (review)

In late eighteenth-century Suriname, the Dutch physician Godfried Wilhelm Schilling bought a 'secret cure' from a 'dress mama', a female black healer using herbal medicine and magic to treat leprosy and other illnesses on the colonial plantations. The cure consisted of administering purgative herbs, applying other herbs to the affected spots on the skin, having leprosy sufferers exercise and covering them in blankets to sweat. While Schilling considered this type of medicine to be erroneous, his curiosity and desire for 'practical' knowledge led him to investigate these healing methods, which overlapped to a certain extent with European practices (e.g. the application of purgatives). It is but one example of the ways in which Dutch colonial doctors effectively engaged with what they regarded 'folk medicine'. Through a critical reading of their writings, Stephen Snelders is able to reconstruct some of the healing practices and beliefs of the Afro-Surinamese population, to which the majority of leprosy sufferers in Suriname belonged.

Leprosy and Colonialism therefore does not offer a top-down narrative about western measures to control a 'tropical' disease–Dutch colonial doctors and state officials believed that leprosy had travelled with slaves from West-Africa to Suriname. It rather presents a multi-faceted history of leprosy as a disease that they were never fully able to manage, creating new room–because of this inability–to understand the agency and experience of those who suffered from it. Besides taking non-western healing practices and beliefs seriously, Snelders's account consists of a critical analysis of colonial health policies. These policies were necessarily informed by medical knowledge, which was itself the product of contemporary colonial, racial, and moral thinking. They were also the result of political compromises between the interests of religious groups (Catholics, Protestants), economic stake holders (plantation owners), and the colonial state.

The book is structured in two chronological parts, divided by the end of slavery in Suriname in 1863. From 1750 to that moment, leprosy was regarded in the first place as an economic problem for the plantation and slave owners. To this economic threat, fears were added about the transmission of the disease from the slave population to the Dutch colonizers and, with them, to the Netherlands. In the period from 1863 to 1950, leprosy was turned into a public health problem for a modern colonial state that aimed to turn its inhabitants into loyal citizens, a policy that included health education. While the judicial and political framework now changed, Snelders points to the many continuities with the pre-1863 slave society. The racialized and sexualized framing of leprosy persisted: the Afro-Surinamese population continued to be seen as more susceptible to leprosy because of its unhealthy lifestyle and loose sexual morality. Black leprous girls seducing white men formed an imagery that left little room for empathy with the sufferers of the disease. A policy of compulsory segregation–driven by the fear of contagion–also persisted. The nineteenth-century leprosy asylums of Voorzorg ('Prevention') and Batavia in the jungle were succeeded by new ones at the turn of the twentieth century, which were built closer to the populated quarters. In each part of the book, separate chapters on non-western medicine and life inside these asylums are included.

One of the key findings is undoubtedly that Suriname's health policies surrounding leprosy followed their own logic. They were particular in the sense that international medical debates about the mode of transmission of leprosy (e.g., the nineteenth-century debate on whether or not it was a hereditary or contagious affection) had little effect on Suriname. These debates, as Snelders shows, reached the Netherlands in particular after leprosy reappeared there in the 1860s–until then, no instances of the disease had been known for a long time. The source was not Suriname but the Dutch East Indies, from which soldiers were said to have brought it back...