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Making and Unmaking the Asylum: Leprosy and Modernity in Singapore and Malaysia
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Author: Loh Kah Seng
Subjects: History, Malaysia, Singapore
Condition: Good
Publisher: SIRD
Published: 2009
Paperback, 189 pages
Subjects: History, Malaysia, Singapore
Condition: Good
Publisher: SIRD
Published: 2009
Paperback, 189 pages
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.
