Loh Kah Seng. Making and Unmaking the Asylum: Leprosy and Modernity in Singapore and Malaysia. Petaling Jaya: SIRD, 2009. Pp. 189. ISBN: 9789833782765. Product ID: 434

‘An outstanding and timely contribution to the historiography of Malaysia and Singapore: well-written, comprehensive, compelling, and poignantly illustrated. The stories present a striking and moving narrative of life on the margins of society. Highly recommended reading on the social history of Malaysia and Singapore’. Dr Ernest Koh, Lecturer, School of Historical Studies, Monash University

‘This book awakens us to the final remaining agendum for people affected by leprosy: a challenge to society, and to each of us as members; how we chose to respond is a measure of our conscience and sense of justice’. Kay Yamaguchi, Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation

Making and Unmaking the Asylum is a book which tells of two entangled stories – one of the misapplication of modern medicine – and the other of the resilience and resourcefulness of those who suffered from the disease and its terrible consequences.

It is a social history of leprosy and leprosy sufferers in Singapore and Malaysia. It is a story of what has been feared, hidden and nearly forgotten.

But it is also a book which demands that we examine the nature and consequences of our unceasing pursuit of modernity. It calls to attention the discomforting shape of our beliefs in modern science, disease and contagion.

The book started in 2004 with research into the official records on leprosy in Singapore and Malaysia. The documents unravel the operation of a powerful policy of compulsory segregation; those suffering from leprosy were seized by the authorities and detained indefinitely in leprosariums. There was no cure; instead, the inmates were to be socially engineered into ‘self-respecting’ members of ‘an organised community’. It was chiefly the low-income Chinese men which the policy targeted.

The asylum became a social experiment in ‘high modernism’ while society was to be kept safe from what was erroneously believed to be ‘a dangerous contagion’.

Life for many reluctant inmates was ‘living hell’. Some sought escape over the high walls and barbed wire of the leprosariums. Others simply rejected the dreary and alien regimen of institutional life by committing suicide. The treatment, ineffective until after the war, caused physical and emotional pain and trauma, and led many patients to reject it.

But the sufferers also contested the regime of high modernist segregation in dynamic and ingenious ways. This became clear to me when the vantage point of the government embedded in the official records was countered and balanced out by the experiences and voices of the sufferers themselves. I interviewed elderly former patients at Silra Home, in Singapore, and Sungei Buloh Hospital, the so-called ‘Valley of Hope’, in Kuala Lumpur.

Collectively, subtly and in the long run, the inmates became ‘residents’, where the asylums were ‘unmade’ and became ‘homes’. Sungei Buloh, Pulau Jerejak and Trafalgar, the three main leprosariums in Singapore and Malaysia, were all reimagined and recreated by the residents themselves. The asylums’ keepers were not unchallenged in projecting the power of high modernism and were unable to prevent the rise of semi-autonomous ways of life in the leprosariums.

The residents insisted on the importance of family, friends, popular culture, and religion in the institution, and on activities which were officially frowned upon, such as forming secret societies, gambling and moonshining. The residents, in short, possessed ‘the weapons of the weak’.

But, as the book emphasises, the public stigma against leprosy remains, the disease continues to be misunderstood, and many cured patients still experience family and social rejection. As they have faced various forms of physical and emotional relocation and dislocation in the past, they are now confronting the reality that their homes will soon be demolished or converted into new uses. The history of leprosy in Singapore and Malaysia is not yet at an end.

Loh Kah Seng
May 2009

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