Episode 91 - Dr. Susan Burns (Chicago)

In this episode, Dr. Susan Burns positions the history of leprosy in Japan amidst changing conceptions of disease and medical practice in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods.  We discuss premodern understandings of disease as karmic retribution, government responses to infectious disease, the geographical distribution of medical institutions, and geospatial stigmas associated with the afflicted. (Transcript here).