The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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In 1865, the Hawaiian Legislature, recognizing the disastrous fact
that leprosy is at once contagious and incurable, passed an act to
prevent its spread, and eventually the Board of Health established a
leper settlement on the island of Molokai for the isolation of
lepers.
In carrying out the painful task of weeding out and exiling
the sufferers, the officials employed met with unusual difficulties;
and the general foreign community was not itself aware of the
importance of making an attempt to "stamp out" the disease, until
the beginning of Lunalilo's reign, when the apparently rapid spread
of leprosy, and sundry rumours that others than natives were
affected by it, excited general alarm, and not unreasonably, for
medical science, after protracted investigation, knows less of
leprosy than of cholera. Nor are medical men wholly agreed as to
the manner in which infection is communicated; and, as the white
residents on the islands associate very freely and intimately with
the natives, eating poi out of their calabashes, and sleeping in
their houses and on their mats, there was just cause for uneasiness.
The natives themselves have been, and still are, perfectly reckless
about the risk of contagion, and although the family instinct among
them is singularly weak, the gregarious or social instinct is
singularly strong, and it has been found impossible to induce them
to give up smoking the pipes, wearing the clothes, and sleeping on
the mats of lepers, which three things are universally regarded by
medical men as undoubted sources of infection.
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