Leprosy and slavery in Suriname: Godfried Schilling and the framing of a racial pathology in the eighteenth century

The skin disease boasie became a major health problem in the Dutch colony of Suriname from the 1740s–1750s onwards. European doctors attempted to come to a closer understanding of the disease, and established that it was identical to the leprosy of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Prussian surgeon and medical doctor Godfried Wilhelm Schilling (c. 1735 – after 1795) played a key role in this process. Schilling tried to give solutions to the medical and public health problems related to the disease. In particular, he had to mediate between the public interests of the colonial authorities, wishing to curb the spread of the disease, and the private interests of the local planter and slave-owning elite, concerned about financial losses. Schilling framed boasie as a disease of African origin, with strong racial and sexual overtones. This racial framing contributed to policies of isolation of boasie sufferers. The disease was tainted with moral and cultural value judgments, as a health danger brought over by African slaves, threatening the new Caribbean slave societies of the eighteenth centuries and ultimately the Dutch colonial empire itself. This framing of leprosy in racial terms was not a product of nineteenth-century imperialism, Social Darwinism and bacteriology, but of the plantation economy and of a pre-modern medicine.