麻风隔离与近代中国

The Segregation of Lepers in Modern China

清末民初随着帝国主义列强进入中国的西洋传教士与医生主要的活动之一就是推动麻风院的成立。这个运动始于 1 880年代 ,进入民国时期后更为积极。中国的社会精英亦投入此运动中。对西洋人而言 ,细菌论、热带医学的兴起、传教的需要都是建立麻风院的主要考虑。中国精英则认为铲除代表中国民族落后与政府无能的麻风是当务之急。两者均认为将麻风病人与社会隔离是达到消灭麻风的主要方法 ,而传统中国社会对此疾病是无知与冷漠的。事实上中国东南地区自明中叶以来即普遍建立了隔离麻风病人的机构 ,这个传统一直至清末从末中断。这个传统的被忽视反映了近代麻风隔离措施背后复杂的意识形态因素。

Leprosaria were introduced into China by Western missionaries and medical experts from the 1880s onwards, accelerating in the early decades of the 20th century. This corresponded to a growing world movement to segregate of lepers especially in colonized countries, reinforced by the new germ theory and the ideology behind “tropical medicine.” In the Republican period Chinese social and medical elites participated actively in this movement, convinced that the problem had been completely ignored by traditional China. To rid China of leprosy became an urgent task as the endemic symbolized the inferiority of the Chinese race and the incompetence of the Chinese state. However, both Western and Chinese activists ignored an important tradition of leprosaria that had begun in the early 16th century in southeastern China. This uninterrupted tradition, enforced by the Qing state in the early 18th century, continued well into the late Qing period. Unreserved acceptance of the rationale of the Western model of leprosaria reveals the choice of China's nationalists of the period: to imitate the West without referring to the nation's own past.