Leprosy in British India, 1860-1940: colonial politics and missionary medicine.

Leprosy has received scant attention in discussions of health in colonial India, which have focused on imperial and colonial politics, and on state intervention.1 Nongovernmental efforts, of which leprosy offers an important instance, have been neglected.2 In this article I discuss the dissemination of western medicine for leprosy in colonial India, which was largely the work of Christian missionaries. David Arnold has pointed out that "the extent to which missionaries were successful disseminators of Western medical ideas and practices in India ... has yet to receive serious scholarly attention."3 Discussion of the work of medical missionaries with leprosy sufferers also opens up for further examination the processes by which western medicine took root in the sub-continent. All too often western medicine in India has been read as a scientific intervention, especially from the 1870s onwards with the advent of germ theories. In many ways leprosy was unique. For much of the nineteenth century western medicine was characterized by ignorance about causation and transmission of the disease, and had no cure for it; there was also much prejudice against leprosy in the West, which intruded into