I was recently fortunate enough to travel to Hawaii. While there, it had been one of my goals to visit the former leper colony on Molokai (which is now a National Park). This turned out to be considerable more difficult than I expected and I was unable to make the journey; however, in advance of my hoped-for trip, I read this book. In it, Mr. Tayman has provided a detailed, yet readable, history of leprosy in Hawaii.
As a Catholic, I was initially interested in the recently canonized saints, Damien and Marianne Cope, who spent decades working with the exiles on Molokai. Certainly, Mr. Tayman gives them their due. Fr. Damien, who was only meant to spend a few months on the island, is thrust into fame, and spends the rest of his life there, eventually contracting the disease himself. Sr. Marianne, on the other hand, leads a group of nuns to the island and works for decades before succumbing to old age.
However, Mr. Tayman has much more to tell us than the story of two saints. He describes the origin of the colony in the nineteenth century and the struggle of making it even barely functional in its early years. He recounts its rise to prominence/infamy with famous visitors like Mark Twain, Jack London, and Robert Lewis Stevenson. He also takes the time to describe the disease itself: it two types, the rarity of being able to develop the disease even when infected, the progress of the disease, and the efforts made to understand and combat it.
And yet, in the end, the most important thing in this book is probably his stories of the native Hawaiian who were horribly impacted by the existence of the colony. They were systematically rounded up and forced to live in this substandard place because of misunderstanding and fear of leprosy. For many years, until the disease was better understood, a number of people without the disease were exiled. Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the fact that this colony was kept in use until very recently, late into the twentieth century. Even now, people who were once exiles, continue to live there (which is why visiting is restricted).
I had known stories about the colony on Molokai since I was a little kid. The story of St. Damien was well known in my Catholic school. I learned so much from reading this book, however. It is a story that deserves to be better known and this is a good place to start.
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Marti
It arrived in excellent condition and very promptly
Reviewed in Canada on July 3, 2014
