Ma‘i Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i

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.