ANTC68H3 Chapter Notes -Debridement, Addiction, Social Cost
Document Summary
Week 5: self-mortification and the stigma of leprosy in northern india by barrett. Stigma and untouchability status of lepers creates lifelong prospects of divorce, eviction, loss of employment, and ostracism from family and social networks. This disease illustrates the distinction between pathophysiology of a disease and the human experience of illness as suffering. Physical and social stigma of hd are interconnected and leprosy is best approaches as an illness of discrimination inclusive of its physical condition. Study is an ethnographic in nature looking at the hd patients in colony/ashram and squatter/street settings 72 in total. 3 destructive processes by which social stigma became physically expressed: concealment leading to under treatment, dissociation and self-neglect, self-mutilation under conditions of extreme poverty. As a result of these processes, people embodied the local prejudices that exacerbated their condition in the first place. Mycobacterium leprae is among the least contagious of human pathogens.
