Leprosy as a multilayered biosocial phenomenon: The comparison of institutional responses and illness narratives of an endemic disease in Brazil and an imported disease in Portugal

This paper questions the relation between human health and society from the case study of leprosy. To discuss the cultural and social mediator factors of both the experience of leprosy and outcomes of medical practices, it examines the biomedical twist in the dialectic between citizenship and public good that aimed to turn leprosy into a disease like any other, with the advent of multidrug therapy during the 1980s. Such analysis is based on a multisited ethnography, developed between 2008 and 2013 in two divergent contexts from the global South and North: Brazil, which remains the country in the world with the highest relative cases of leprosy, and Portugal, in which leprosy has become an imported disease.
Source: Clinics in Dermatology - Category: Dermatology Authors: Source Type: research