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Katherine Foxhall, Kerri A. Inglis. Ma‘i Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1507–1508, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1507
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Leprosy has been the focus of a number of important studies in the history of colonial public health, medicine, politics, and citizenship in recent years. Ma‘i Lepera makes a significant addition to this literature with a detailed examination of the nineteenth-century Hansen's disease outbreak on the Hawaiian islands between 1865 and 1900, and the settlement established by the Hawaiian Board of Health at the isolated Makanalua peninsula on the island of Molokai. Over a century, between seven and eight thousand leprosy sufferers, ninety percent of them native Hawaiians, were sent to the peninsula. This was a “natural prison,” surrounded on three sides by ocean and separated from the rest of the island by almost impassable and forbidding cliffs, or pali. The first chapter lays out a key argument: that this was a disease and land “set apart.” Further chapters focus on the criminalization and stigmatization of leprosy, sufferers' attempts to resist removal and separation, life and death in the settlement, and the experience of arrest and exile.
