Most people don't know about Hansen's Disease, if you were to ask them about it. I only know because of Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, because Donaldson's father was a doctor who specialised in treating it and he gave the main character of his books the disease.
But people have heard of it's other name--leprosy.
Leper, outcast--it conjures ancient fears, images of people with deformed and missing parts of their body, of infection, etc.
The fact of the matter is, leprosy isn't so infectious. 95% of our population is immune to it, being such an old disease. Plus, it can't even be cultured in a lab normally...it has to be cultured from animals that carry the disease like armadillos. It's relatively easy to cure--new drugs can't repair loss of sensation or damage, but can render it noninfectious. 6,500 or so people live in the US with leprosy and its effects. More live throughout the world, and of course are less likely to receive treatment and more likely to be shunned. In the US the main problem is many doctors have never seen a case of leprosy and would not recognise the tell-tale signs until damage has taken place.
The article, Living with Leprosy, gives a good look at leprosy, from what remains of a leper colony in Louisiana to what's it like to get the diagnosis, to how the disease is studied.
Because of the Donaldson books and because of my study of ancient and mediaeval history, I've always been fascinated by leprosy. And as a child growing up in Louisiana, I played with those very same armadillos at times. And of course as a medical librarian, I'm intrigued by various syndromes and diseases. So I found the whole article group very interesting. Leprosy is a both a success story in that it can be cured, and yet the horror it conjures is still very palpable in the modern world.
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