Complex microcosms: asylums and treatments, 1900–1950

This chapter explores the modern leprosy asylums in Suriname. In the modern Catholic and Protestant asylums of Majella and Bethesda Christian missionaries gave leprosy care a central place in their activities and in the presentation of these activities to their co-religionists and financiers in Europe. Together with the Groot-Chatillon state asylum, Christian asylums were interconnected parts of a system of leprosy care that was created after accommodation between the colonial state and the Christian churches in the 1890s. What resulted was a system including care and medical treatment by colonial medicine that ideally would return cured and grateful citizens back to society. Looking from ‘below’, the asylums were characterised by their own infrapolitics of friction and resentment. The permeability of asylum boundaries characterised by movement of patients between asylums and the outside world, and even between asylums was apparent. In everyday life there were limits to the disciplinary power of the regimes in the asylums.