Outcast

Beschrijving

The story of how one misunderstood disease became the global blueprint for stigma and ostracization

Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World reveals leprosy as the world’s foundational stigma, underlying the colonialism, exclusion, and exploitation that has shaped contemporary life.

After hearing leprosy being used as an anti-immigration dog whistle, Oliver Basciano began a journey into the past, uncovering how this ancient disease has been weaponized, used to justify forced exile and social ostracism around the world. Traveling from the last leprosarium in Europe to remote villages in Mozambique, from Siberian settlements to Brazil’s hinterlands, Basciano builds a history that centers the voices of patients and those forced into the colony system. Along the way, he finds communities formed in exile, patient activism, and the persistent human capacity for joy.

In this pulsating, compassionate book, the trope of medieval suffering is transformed into a bitingly relevant study of hope and solidarity.

Beschrijving

On a fateful night in 1860, Thadius Grady realises, too late, that he has made a grave mistake. In blind faith he has put himself and his daughter Emma at the mercy of his sister and her conniving husband, Caleb Crowther – for he has entrusted to them his entire fortune and the daughter he adores. With his dying breath he pleads to see his daughter one last time – but Caleb’s heart is made of stone. A feared Lancashire Justice, Caleb Crowther is a womaniser and a gambler, and now the inheritance due to Emma is as much in his hands as is the beautiful Emma Grady herself. But Caleb lives in fear of the past, for how did Emma’s mother mysteriously die? And what made Thadius and Caleb hate the river people so intensely? History seems likely to repeat itself when Emma falls helplessly in love with Marlow Tanner, a young bargee. For Marlow and Emma, it is an impossible love – a love made in Heaven, but which could carry them both to Hell …