Making and Unmaking the Asylum: Leprosy and Modernity in Singapore and Malaysia

Making and Unmaking the Asylum recounts the entangled stories of leprosy in colonial and postcolonial Malaya/Malaysia and Singapore – decades of heavy-handed biomedical policies and laws enacted in the name of modernity, science and development, interwoven with the personal accounts of those who were sent to the asylums. The leprosarium was a living hell for many. It is also no coincidence, Loh argues, that the majority of patients were poor and working-class. Yet this book also richly demonstrates how patients resisted being victims – creating new families, forging friendships, working, joining unions, and actively engaging in their communal religious and cultural lives. Having struggled to remake the asylums into homes, ex-sufferers in both countries have been evicted or moved again, their personal and collective histories erased and their real homes exchanged for antiseptic hospital wards, or worse.

Publisher: SIRD

Paperback

2009

ISBN: 9789833782765