2 - Scientists discuss the causes of leprosy, and the disease becomes a public issue in Britain and its empire, 1867–1898

Summary

Milroy in the West Indies

The Royal College of Physicians' Report on Leprosy 1867 was based on information gathered across the empire as interpreted by advanced metropolitan thinking on leprosy in particular and disease in general. Its findings, however, made little difference to how the disease was regarded in most colonial territories. In the West Indies particularly its conclusions were ignored or resisted, and in the decade following the report Milroy was frequently called upon to endorse and restate its findings.

The most common challenge to the report came in the form of claims to have found a cure for the disease. Having declared that leprosy was non-infectious, the College of Physicians was bound to regard such claims with deep scepticism. In the years following the Report local remedies such as gurjun and cashew nut oil were often suggested to the Colonial Office from various colonial territories. These would be passed on to Milroy, who was consistently dismissive of such claims. As he wrote to the Colonial Office in 1878: ‘It is vain to look for any permanent benefit from empirical medicaments in a bad form of Cachexia, or chronic malady connected with constitutional depravation. Unhappily, the public is, every now and then, being misled by the announcements of specific remedies which are speedily found to be utterly fallacious, if not also positively mischievous.’ One such claim, a decade earlier, had taken Milroy to the West Indies.