contagious insensibility: the emotional terrain of leprosy ... · atlantic trade, the commercial...

Contagious Insensibility: The Emotional Terrain of Leprosy, Race, and the

Enlightenment in the French Antilles Kristen Block (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Presented for the Brown University Early Modern Studies Workshop, October 22, 2019

He is a leper because he feels nothing [il est ladre car il ne sent rien] – Old French proverb1

He is a leper who feels nothing: insults don’t touch him at all [C’est un ladre qui ne sent rien: les affronts ne le

toucherent point.] – Gloss on RIEN, Dictionnaire universel françois & latin (1704)2

Two medical professionals recently removed from Provence to the French Antilles learned the

hard way that their professional reputations and emotional equilibrium could be seriously shaken in just a

heartbeat. It happened to the first man in 1728, a newly-appointed royal physician by the name of Jean-

André Peyssonnel. Two months after he had collaborated with the colonial government in Guadeloupe to

formalize plans to create a new colony for leprosy sufferers on a nearby deserted island of La Désirade,

he received news that his well-established colleague in Martinique, also a royal physician, had written an

excoriating response to their joint report. He railed against Peyssonnel personally for his lack of learning,

of prudence, and of compassion—peppering his text with scathing lines sharp enough to make anyone

1 Archives nationales d’outre mer, France (hereafter FR ANOM), Col. C7A10. Louis de Bordegaraye, Remarques sur

le procès-verbal de Mont Saint Remy et Mesnier, 7 mai 1728 (hereafter Bordegaraye, Remarks). Cette maladie ancienne

qu’on apelloit lespre [sic], parce que la peau de ceux qui en etoient attaqués, etoit raboteuse et Ecailleuse comme cela

d’un Elephant inpenetrable aux insultes des objets tactiles, qui ne pourroient aller jusqu’aux papilles nervées de la peau

pour y Causer la sensation du Toucher : D’où est venu le vieux proverbe, il est ladre car il ne sent rien. Many thanks to

Joanna Merkel and Marie-Claude Marianne dit Gerard Joseph who assisted by transcribing most of these manuscript

documents for me. Translations from the French, unless otherwise noted, are my own. Please alert me to any possible

errors in transcription/translation. 2 Several of the multiple entries for LADRE (leper/leprous) and LADRERIE (leprosy) in eighteenth-century dictionaries

include similar “figurative meanings” with pejorative connotations, whether to describe a person unfeeling to others’

suffering, or to describe miserly, impure or wicked behavior. Another common proverb noted under Ladrerie: “Poverty is

not a vice, but a kind of leprosy—everyone flees from it” (La pauvreté n’est pas vice, mais c’est une espece de ladrerie,

chacun la fuit). The quoted example above seems to have also been used in reverse, according to one example under

LADRE: “I really felt that blow—I’m not a leper! (J’ay bien ressenti ce coup, je ne suis pas ladre). Dictionnaire universel

françois & latin: contenant la signification et la définition tant des mots de l'une & de l'autre langue, avec leurs différens

usages… avec des remarques d'érudition et de critique (Trevaux, 1704), Vol 2.

https://books.google.com/books?id=MVpZ4zxi3sgC OR ARTFL ?

https://books.google.com/books?id=MVpZ4zxi3sgC

K Block / DRAFT PLEASE do not circulate or cite without express written permission.

2

cringe: “all of his work is an embarrassment.”3 In another incident, in Martinique in 1742, a master

surgeon by the name of François-Joseph Ruffy found himself shouted down in the middle of a public

presentation in which he described his intellectual awakening and his expertise in curing maladies that he

believed lay acheminement à la lèpre (“on the road to leprosy”). So flustered was Ruffy by this

aggressive dismissal of his ideas that he left without his umbrella. The royal physician (whose house

Ruffy had fled), seeing the last remnant of Ruffy’s offending presence, responded by flinging the

umbrella “out the window onto the street.”4

Two overlapping “emotional communities” or “moral economies” of the French Antilles were at

play in these dramatic incidents of rejection.5 One was centered on the professional values of careful

observation, learnedness, and reputation in the burgeoning “Age of Reason.”6 The other perhaps should

be called the “nervous state” of an expanding French empire, an anxious cadre of elites that both heralded

French growth as a global power and carefully watched the colonies for signs of corruption—especially

given periodic critiques of brutality towards Amerindians and enslaved Africans, and fears of French

bodily degradation from the dramatically different climate.7 Moreover, diseases without cures unsettled

3 Aix-en-Provence, France. Archives nationales d’outre mer, Sección Col. (hereafter FR ANOM COL), C7A10,

Bordegaraye, Remarks, ff. 220r, 221r-v. Voila, tout l’œuvre qu’embrasse son[…] ingenieuse construction ? Idée

satisfaisante ? j’en laisse juger ceux qui lisont le procés verbal qui decrit si mal une maladie imaginée dont on fait tant de

bruit en France et dans les isles… voila bien du Bruit pour peu de chose… 4 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, p. 16 /Image 132 [provided for better access to the digitized manuscript],

http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ark:/61561/zn401xxuqvh]. ledit sieur Ruffy se retira, et ayant par hazard

oublié son parasol, le sieur médecin le jetta par la fenestre dans la rue. 5 Barbara H. Rosenwein’s “emotional communities” are defined as “groups in which people adhere to the same norms

of emotional expression, and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions.” Emotional Communities in the Early

Middle Ages (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 2. Lorraine Daston articulated a similar concept in

“The Moral Economy of Science” (Osiris Vol. 10, “Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science” (1995)) where the

term refers to as “a web of affect-saturated values… [both] psychological and … normative… a balanced system of

emotional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints” (4). One could also add William Reddy’s coinage for

“emotional regimes,” which places more emphasis on the power differentials among members of different emotional

communities, and the importance of learning to navigate the most powerful regimes well, to conform or transgress. 6 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago & London:

University of Chicago Press, 1985); Dan Edelstein, “Worldliness, Politeness, and the Importance of Not Being Too

Radical,” Ch. 13 in The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 7 Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press, 2005); Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial

Slavery (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006); Myriam Cottias, “La séduction colonial: Damnation et stratégies,

Les Antilles, XVIIe-XIXe siècle,” Séduction et sociétés: approaches historiques, ed. Cécile Dauphin & Arlette Farge

(Paris: Seuil, 2001): 125-40; Guillaume Aubert, “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic

http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ark:/61561/zn401xxuqvh


3

both communities, and it is no surprise that contested diagnoses of leprosy8 lay at the heart of their

dramas demonstrating both cold dread and fierce anger. For French men of science, leprosy had faded to

the point where it was almost unknown, and thus became an open terrain for contestation in the battle

between the ancients and the moderns. French colonial society—increasingly becoming a slave society—

was especially unsettled by the fact that this ailment came from Africa, but had quickly spread to white

habitants, even “the Heads of the Colony, and the most reasonable people [les plus sensés] within it.”9

This article first engages with the terminology of sensibility, or as Diderot described it in the

Encyclopédie, “that which opposes death.”10 The expression at the head of this article—“He is a leper

because he feels nothing” falls under sensibility’s embodied realm of both sensation and sympathy. The

moral and philosophical charge of this keyword and its related terms (sense; sensible; sensation;

sentiment, etc.) ordered eighteenth-century French science and affective society. I argue that the opposite

of these terms, notably that of insensibilité, may be used as a kind of cipher for apprehension about the

absence of this most valued quality of body, mind, and spirit.11 Sensibility was the opposite of leprosy,

World,” WMQ 61, no. 3 (2004): 439-78. ALSO ? Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in

Colonial Congo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). 8 Leprosy’s causative bacterial agent was not discovered until 1874, by Norwegian doctor Gerhard A. Hansen, for

whom the disease is now named—in large part to counter historical stigmas. For a good short overview of Hansen’s

Disease, see Natalie Angier, “Leprosy, Still Claiming Victims,” The New York Times June 30, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/science/leprosy-still-claiming-victims.html?_r=0. 9 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, "Dissertation sur une Maladie observée dans quelques Îles de Vent de

l’Amerique en 1748," no pagination. Les Chefs de la Colonie, et les gens les plus sensés qui la composent. 10 Quote from Henry Martyn Lloyd, “Introduction” to The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the

Enlightenment, ed. H.M. Lloyd (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2013), p. 5 11 Lloyd argues that these related terms should “be read, as they were in used in the period, with a good deal of

imprecision; as will become clear, the terms bleed into one another such that they are perhaps best described as a family of

concepts” (Lloyd, “Introduction,” p. 3). I have drawn on the insights of literary scholars like Anne Vila and Jessica Riskin,

and so many others intrigued by the Enlightenment era’s interest in “sense and sensibility.” R

Most sensibility scholarship deals with the latter half of the eighteenth century. Vila’s study of medicine and literature

argues that the fully formed idea of sensibility as both an emotional state and a medical “fact” fused no earlier than the

1740s, after the popularization of Herman Boerhave’s lectures on nerves by his student Albrecht von Haller. Anne C.

Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). I am more persuaded by the arguments of George Rousseau, who posits that

eighteenth-century intellectuals had long been grappling with the mind-body dualisms of Descartes’ philosophical

paradigm shift, and that Boerhave’s and Haller’s work was only followed so avidly and their impact so widely felt because

two generations had already anxiously debated the role of the senses in science and the corporeal connection to the soul.

See George S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2004); especially chapters on “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Toward the Origin of Sensibility” and “‘Originated Neurology’:

Nerves, Spirits and Fibres” most useful. See also François Azouvi, « Quelques jalons dans la préhistoire des sensations

internes, » Revue de synthèse 105, no. 113/114 (1984) : 113-33.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/science/leprosy-still-claiming-victims.html?_r=0


4

given the disquieting ability of the disease to render its victims numb and unaware [insensible] of their

bodily corruption. I pay attention to the complex layers of sentience in this case, where healthy colonists

feared insensibility and resisted critiques of slavery as collective dis-ease (or mal-aise).12 I argue that such

conceptual work parallels eighteenth-century critiques of the negative consequences of slavery and

Atlantic trade, the commercial contagion spread by libertine Frenchmen who violated the “natural order”

that presumed to keep colonists and slaves separate.

The intuitive flexibility of sensibility/sensibilité (as a word and a concept) was already deeply

rooted in the language of learned men like Peyssonnel and Bordegaraye. Bordegaraye had used the

language of sensibility to denigrate Peyssonnel’s education and failings as a man of science (“The doctor

who calls himself a perceptive [sensible] Philosophe, wants facts and not imagined reasons.”)13 Ruffy’s

insensibility to colonial stereotypes about leprosy’s transmission through interracial sex explains the

passionate rejection of his theory of ailments “on the road to leprosy” [acheminement à la lépre],

especially when attached to a white demoiselle who was the ward of a local merchant concerned for his

reputation.

In this article, I make a case for developing emotional sensibility as historians of medicine,

working to uncover an embodied, affective history of colonialism and race-making.14 Incorporating

insights from the “affective turn” in humanities scholarship means leaning into the “emotional practices”

and “moral economies” articulated in writings from the eighteenth-century French Antilles. My sources,

nearly 400 pages of them, represent the opinions of Peyssonnel and Bordegaraye, of Ruffy and his

12 Anne Laura Stoler uses this term in her article “Archival Dis-Ease: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies”

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, 2 (2010): 215-219, although its origins can be traced back at least to the

first translator of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (a rejected, alternate English title was said to be the “Dis-ease of

Civilization,” to describe unconscious guilt and discontent at both cultural and psychological levels). See Brenda Maddox,

Freud’s Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis (London: Da Capo Press, 2009), p. 208. Today

the hyphenation of dis-ease is more often found among religious studies scholars and others interested in observing the

emotional-biological-spiritual aspects of social pathology and healing. 13 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarques, f. 220. Le medecin qui est apellé Philosophe sensible, veut des

faits et non par des raisons imaginées : Et l’operation que Sa science medite, a des Effets Certains : 14 A similar approach was practiced by Fay Bound Alberti, in ther article, “Bodies, Hearts, and Minds: Why Emotions

Matter to Historians of Science and Medicine,” Isis 100, no 4 (2009): 798-810.


5

detractors, as well as additional experts and colonial officials who had to decide what to do when medical

professionals disagreed so profoundly in their diagnostics. I scrutinize these accounts, copied and edited

to be rendered legible for colonial governments, reading for the emotional resonances behind the “stuck

points” in repeated phrasing and seemingly endlessly replayed arguments. The sensibility of these reports

is one of obsessive defensiveness about the defining features of leprosy, which in many ways served as a

proxy for subsumed debates about the health of the body politic. Reading for emotional eruption, the

moments that Anne Stoler describes as “archival excess,” also gives the historian glimpses into

rationalized suppressions and silenced conversations, even the absence of documents purposefully

omitted from the record.15 Furthermore, beyond these repeated attempts to get to “the truth” of leprosy’s

origins, transmission, and threat to white bodies, we see the resulting insensibility of French medical and

colonial politics, which mostly ignored the real suffering in the colonies: both that of the thousands of

enslaved Africans and that of people presumed to be tainted by the “incurable” scourge of leprosy.

Sensibility allows scholars to represent an embodied understanding of emotions in the eighteenth

century. Jessica Riskin has explained how sensibility encompassed scientist-observers’ abilities to

accurately sense the world around them, and to respond to their larger social milieu in a way that

demonstrated noble qualities of feeling. In this perfect interaction between eighteenth-century French

science and culture, “ideas, emotions, and moral sentiments alike were expressions of sensibility,

movements of the body’s parts in response to sensory impressions of the outside world.”16 I combine

15 Indeed, this project came about because I had discovered two additional documents by Peyssonnel (a letter and

follow-up report from 1748) that never found their way into French archives, which I came to see as a possible

institutional silencing. In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2010), Stoler describes how the process of copying, editing, and recopying in colonial

European archives reflects “uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule

correspond to a changing imperial world” (4). 16 Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2. According to the Encylopédie: “The operation of the soul [l’âme] has as much

sensibility” as the vascular system, the menstrual cycle, or organs of sensation like the eyes, the tongue, etc. The

“pleasure, sorrow, [and] all the passions” that humans experienced, as well as “acts of memory,” argued the author, were

linked to the stomach and the body’s “nervous plexus” which led to a physical “sentiment of unease [mal-aise]”

(translation mine). Henri Fouquet, « Sensibilité, sentiment », Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts

et des métiers, eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project

(Autumn 2017 Edition), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds), 15:42,


6

sensibility scholarship with the insights of more recent historians of emotion like Monique Scheer, who

argues (via Pierre Bourdieu and Practice Theory) that emotions should be understood as a type of bodily

practice (i.e. rehearsed, skillful behaviors—a “learned repertoire”) that is largely unconscious and thus

goes beyond “performance,” “cognition,” and “discourse.”17 Like modern neuroscientists, she and other

recent scholars assert that embodied emotion operates in a “mostly automatic” way (enacted through

“subtleties of movement, posture, gesture and expression”) that connects actors to their social milieu and

to themselves.18 Although we might think of the modern idea of “mirror neurons” in human connection as

evolutionary, we can historicize how worldviews described in language-bound written sources gave rise

to emotional expressions and affects.

Historians have long grappled with the ways that scientific uncertainty over the crumbling

authority of “the ancients” rocked the practice and theory of medical practice in the early modern era.19

Of course, these epistemological earthquakes coincided with Europeans’ eager and rapid expansion into

American colonialism and plantation slavery, stimulating a whole range of spiritual and moral quandaries

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/encyclopedie1117/navigate/15/68/. The « moral » definition from the

Encyclopédie reads thus: Sensibilité is the mother of humanity and of generosity; it increases worth, it helps the spirit, and

it incites persuasion. La sensibilité est la mere de l'humanité, de la générosité; elle sert le mérite, secourt l'esprit, &

entraîne la persuasion à sa suite. Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, « Sensibilité [Morale], Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire

raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1765), 15:52. English translation from The Encyclopedia of Diderot

& d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Christelle Gonthier (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University

of Michigan Library, 2004), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.295 (accessed August 29, 2019). 17 Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)?: A Bourdieuian

Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 193-220, esp. pp. 199-202. Happily the

“universalist” (nature) vs. “constructivist” (nurture) camps seem to have come to a détente in recent years as humanists

flirt with embodiment and disciplines like neuroscience confirm a more holistic reality, that “emotional experience is

embodied in physical matter, thinking stuff, and visceral movement… not… a binary model, but an integrated, biocultural

whole.” Rob Boddice, “The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 62 (2017): 12,

https://dx.doi.org/10.7440/res62.2017.02. 18 Other scholarship that informs my theory and method include J. M. Barbalet. “Society’s Body: Emotion and the

‘Somatization’ of Social Theory,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 57; Margrit Pernau, “Space and Emotion: Building to Feel,” History

Compass 12, no. 7 (2014): 541–549; Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the

American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about

Emotions in History,” AHR 107, no. 3 (2002): 821-45. 19 Harold J. Cook, “Victories for Empiricism, Failures for Theory: Medicine and Science in the Seventeenth Century,”

in Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal, eds., The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early

Modern Science (Dordrecht and New York: Springer, 2010); Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and

the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park,

Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1998).

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/encyclopedie1117/navigate/15/68/

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.295

https://dx.doi.org/10.7440/res62.2017.02


7

related to intercultural relationships and violent dominance of the Other. Theories of sensibility, of

slavery and the “science” of race, and those subjects’ connection to the health of the body (politic) were

indeed percolating in the colonies and provinces just as much as they would be in the burgeoning salons,

laboratories, and académies in Paris.20

As far as more direct historiography, few scholars work on leprosy in the Caribbean prior to the

end of the eighteenth century, and thus my work fills a gap in our knowledge of its unfolding from the

medieval to the modern eras.21 Indeed, most of the literature on leprosy has been written by medievalists

or scholars situated in nineteenth-century imperial/national frameworks.22 Even the few book-length

studies that cover leprosy in the eighteenth century Caribbean, like those by Stephen Snelders and Éric

Fougère, have been situated in a longue durée framework that draws attention to the more recent past,

whether looking towards late nineteenth-century medical advancements or to the politics of modern

exclusion.23 In fact, other than Fougère and a few historians of Guadeloupe,24 no French colonial

20 Jeremy L. Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Practice: academic prize contests and intellectual culture in France,

1670-1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). François Regourd, « Lumières coloniales. Les Antilles françaises

dans la république des lettres, » Dix-Huitième Siècle 33 (2001) : 183-200 ; Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness:

Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 21 For my first attempt, see Kristen Block, “Slavery and Inter-Imperial Leprosy Discourse in the Atlantic World,”

Atlantic Studies 14, 2 (February 2017): 243-262. See also Stephen Snelders. “Leprosy and Slavery in Suriname: Godfried

Schilling and the Framing of a Racial Pathology in the Eighteenth Century,” Social History of Medicine 26, 3 (2013): 432-

50. 22 The medieval studies of leprosy which I have surveyed include S. N. Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in

Medieval Literature (Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and

Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Ch. 2, “To Live Outside the Camp: Medieval

Leprosy”; Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2007); and Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY:

The Boydell Press, 2006).

Notable titles focused on the nineteenth and twentieth century context include Adam Warren, Medicine and Politics

in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010),

Ch. 4, “Conquering the Biblical Curse, 1804-1815”; Jane Buckingham, Leprosy in Colonial South India: Medicine and

Confinement (New York: Palgrave, 2002), Rod Edmond, Leprosy and Empire: A medical and cultural history

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Kerri A. Inglis, Maʻi lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-

century Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013), Michelle Therese Moran, Colonizing Leprosy:

Imperialism and the politics of public health in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Michael Worboys, “The Colonial World as Mission and Mandate: Leprosy and Empire, 1900-1940” Osiris Special Issue,

“Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise” 15 (2000): 207-1. 23 Snelders, Leprosy and Colonialism: Suriname under Dutch Rule, 1750-1950 (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 2017); Éric Fougère, Les Îles malades: Léproseries et lazarets de Nouvelle-Calédonie, Guyane et Guadeloupe

(Paris: Classiques Garnier 2018). 24 Fougère, Les Îles malades, pp. 45-78 ; Lucien René ABENON, « La Guadeloupe de 1671 à 1759. Etude politique,

économique et sociale, [s. l.], [s. n.], 1984, t. II, 421-42; Robert DELANNAY, La lutte contre la Lèpre en Guadeloupe :


8

historians (of whom I am aware) have ever studied the larger corpus of manuscript sources included in

my investigation, despite being so neatly copied and catalogued at both the Archives d’outre mer in Aix-

en-Provence and the Archives nationales de France. My work enhances the existing scholarship by

comparing conceptions of leprosy in Guadeloupe and Martinique.

After a brief summary of the French background connecting leprosy with the dangers of foreign

trade and disordered sex, I summarize the outcome of Jean-André Peyssonel’s report on the purported

“epidemic” leprosy following his arrival in Guadeloupe in late 1727, especially the way that the ideas of

sensibility played out in debates over leprosy sufferer’s inability to feel—and the government’s need to

care for the colonial body politic. Next we follow Joseph-François Ruffy’s emotional journey of

enlightenment and his dashed hopes regarding what he believed to be a sound argument about

acheminement—and his mistake of diagnosing a young French orphan with a progressive disease that he

believed had put her on a path to leprosy. I briefly return to the aftermath of the first controversy, as

Peyssonnel and a new royal physician responded to the social and professional fallout of diagnosing white

habitants as well as enslaved Africans with leprosy, and they came to blame individuals’ emotional

excesses for this suffering.

According to Mary Lindeman, there were “over 2,000 leper houses in France in 1225… [but]

leprosy had almost vanished from Europe by the fifteenth century…[and thus] almost all of the once

flourishing leprosaria … had been converted to other purposes.”25 A new “lazaretto” (another name for an

institution devoted to leprosy sufferers) was built in the 1680s in Peyssonnel’s home town of Marseille,

just before his birth in 1694. But this institution would not quarantine people, but rather goods, and was

managed by the merchant class to guarantee healthy commerce with Barbary and the Levant, regions

Résultats obtenus en Grande-Terre (M.D. thèse : Université de Bourdeaux, Faculté Mixte de Médecine et de Pharmacie,

1975) ; J-L. BONNIOL, “Documents pour server à la histoire de la léproserie de la Désirade,” in ABEGNON, BÉGOT et

SAINTON, eds. Construire l’histoire antillaise (Paris : CTHS, 2002). 25 Mary Lindeman, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),

123-25.


9

often depicted as the fount of all plagues and disorders that threatened to infect Europe’s virtuous cities.

Despite these precautions, the plague struck Marseille and its environs in 1720, “and in four months took

away sixty thousand souls.” Peyssonnel carried personal griefs and sentimental associations of this

transfer of disease through trade. His father, the devoted physician Charles Peyssonnel, perished after

having treated its victims. In an anonymous treatise shortly after the epidemic came to an end,

Peyssonnel detailed the “sad spectacle” of abandoned children, “some dying in the Streets, others in the

doors of the Hospitals and Churches.” Other “children at breast… gave suck to their plague-stricken

mothers” even after the women had been reduced to cadavers. Peyssonnel traced the origins of the

disease to a merchant ship from Syria carrying a sick “Turk” aboard, whose illness infected the rest of the

crew and the goods on board. Peyssonnel argued that the “exhalations” of plague-infected goods on the

ship had transmitted their “imperceptible [insensible] parcels of humors” from body to body, and from

contraband goods to villages throughout Provence.26 When writing his full report about leprosy in 1728,

Peyssonnel could not help but be reminded of the dangers of trade given that “I saw and felt all [the]

horrors” of the plague in his own hometown.27

Scholars of Enlightenment literature note that philosophes such as Montesquieu and Voltaire both

“associate[d] colonization with depopulation and the global spread of diseases such as syphilis.”28 It is

important to note that lazarettos used for more than quarantine stations for foreign trade. In 1672, Louis

XIV liberated royal funds previously earmarked for leprosy sufferers for the care of all the ailing poor in

26 [Jean-André Peyssonnel], La contagion de la peste expliquée (Marseille, 1722), pp. 1-12, 84-85. Les vapeurs qui

sortent d’un Corps retiennent les qualités predominantes du Corps d’où elles sortent, parce que les Vapeurs ou

Exhalaïsons ne font elles-mêmes que des parcelles insensibles des Humeurs…. The Mercure de France 12, vol. 2 (1724),

pp. 2835-37 reported on Dr. Charles Peysonnel’s death in 1720, adding news of this treatise, his son’s subsequent

publication, which I have only discovered in one library, at the Aix-Marseille Université (sede Aix-en-Provence). For

more on the Marseille plague, see Junko Thérèse Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early

Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), Chs. 4-5. 27 ANF, Section Marine G//102, no. 102, p. 71. …les vaisseaix venus de siam ont aporté dans ces isles cette cruelle et

mortelle maladie qui a concerné le nom de mal de Siam, cest par le moyen du commerce que la ville de Marseille recut

cette peste qui ravage la provence en 1720 et qui a enleve en quatre mois de temps soixante mille ames, et dont jau vey et

ressenty toutes les horreurs. 28 Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca & London:

Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 298.


10

his kingdom.29 Most people know from Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization that leprosaria were

repurposed to house the insane.30 But what is less know is that other former leprosaria were transformed

to deal with sufferers of syphilis. The Saint-Lazare Hospital in Paris, which had fallen into disrepair by

the early seventeenth century, was transformed into a ward for syphilitics by 1700.31 Peyssonnel probably

had heard that in the early 1720s the General Assembly of Provence built a new hospital for soldiers with

venereal diseases, responding to royal orders that funding from the Order of St. Lazarus should be

redirected from their traditional purposes.32 In fact, debates had raged among French commentators for

decades following the siege of Naples about the virulent spread of this new venereal disease presumed to

stem from the rape of Amerindian women by Columbus’s men, who upon their return to Italy, made a

bee-line for European prostitutes… and the rest was history. Indeed, medieval leprosy’s presumed

relation to sexual licentiousness linked it to syphilis. Many contemporaries posited that there was a strong

connection between the “leprosy of the ancients” and this presumed West Indian “plague.”33

29 June K. Burton, “The Revolution in Health: Leprosy and Society by the French Revolutionary Era,” In Consortium

on Revolutionary Europe, ed. Joseph I. Shulim, ([Tallahassee, Florida]: Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution,

1994), 192. 30 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard

(New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 5. Certainly, some lazarettos made that change relatively early: by the mid-

seventeenth century, the Hospital de Saint-Lazare in Marseille held only a handful of leprosy sufferers, and soon began

taking in other “incurables” in a different ward. After the hospital was incorporated in the Hôtel Dieu in 1696 by royal

patent, it was used to house both criminals and the insane (les insensés) (Augustin Fabre, Histoire des hôpitaux et des

institutions de bienfaisance De Marseille (Marseille: Imprimerie et lithographie de Jules Barile, 1855), Vol. 2, 39-41, 45).

Given his upbringing in Marseille, Peyssonnel may have been more familiar with the transformation of the Hôpital de

Saint-Lazare in that city into housing for the mad (and sometimes a royal jail), which had been the case since 1672.

Augustin Fabre, Histoire des hopitaux et des institutions de bienfaisance de Marseille (Marseille : Impremerie de Jules

Barile, 1855), Vol. 2, 47-54. [SORT OUT REPETITION] 31 Paul Blum, “The Hôpital Saint-Lazare in Paris: Its Past and Present History,” British Journal of Venereal Diseases

(1948): 151-52 32 Abrégé des délibérations faites en l'assemblée générale des communautés de Provence (Aix-en-Provence, 1724).

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6534813v/, p. 39. … il convenoit mieux que cet Hôpital Militaire, destiné pour les

Soldats atteints de maux veneriens, fût etabli, meublé & etretenu, & l’emplacement fourni par les Ordres Hospitaliers-

Militaires, tels que font l’Ordre du Saint Esprit de Montpellier, ceux de Saint Lazare & du Mont-Carmel & autres ; que

l’Ordre de Saint Lazare y étoit d’autant plus obligé, que les revenus des Leproseries lui avoient été unis… Members of

that body insisted (foreseeing the popular beliefs that would inevitably arise) that the matter should be concluded “without

researching if Leprosy was the same malady as that of the Pox.” « sans resercher si la Lepre étoit la même maladie que

celle de la Verole, suivant l’observation de quelques Modernes, ou qu’elle fût differente, rien ne conviendroit mieux que

d’appliquer les revenus des Ordres Militaires-Hospitaliers, à cet Hôpital, que Sa Majesté propose de faire pour les

Soldats atteints de telles maladies. » 33 Peter Lewis Allen compared literary texts to medical treatises in his monograph, The Wages of Sin: Sex and

Disease, Past and Present, esp. Chs. 2, “To Live Outside the Camp: Medieval Leprosy”; and Ch. 3, “The Just Rewards of

Unbridled Lust: Syphilis in Early Modern Europe.” Other examples where this debate appears in publications from

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6534813v/


11

Insensibility and Awakening

Given this reality even in the continent, Jean-André Peyssonnel would have known to treat his

commission as royal physician with extra caution after hearing the statement of “old Mr. Paulin,” who

told the newly-arrived doctor, “it is believed” that the French-descended people on the island had

contracted leprosy “after having had close communication with leprous Negresses, especially in the

beginning when the Distemper is very hidden, and a taint that cannot be perceived.” Peyssonnel read

between the lines to interpret Paulin’s equivocal phrase, “communication,” more explicitly. He concurred

that Paulin’s explanation was “very probable, as we have seen many Mulatto children born to Leprous

Negresses.34 If Peyssonnel was shocked by this revelation, he hid it well, as would any physician called

to treat a patient who feared that their sexual sins had led to a loathsome disease. It is perhaps

unsurprising, then, that mixed-race individuals were among the most suspected of leprosy, even if (after

examination) they were designated so at a much lower rate. Only six of the 47 free mulattoes suspected of

leprosy (13%) were certified as having the disease, a significantly lower ratio than whites (22 of

89=20%). On the other hand, Africans were almost all confirmed as lepers (96 of 120=80%).35

Peyssonnel expressed more scorn for the attempts by many of the suspected sufferers they visited to

“disguise their symptoms [maux].” The team recorded that many “gave us poor excuses… [such as] that it

was Rats which had devoured their feet, and that their Ulcers came from burns.” This seemed an extreme

avoidance tactic—Peyssonnel called them “cunning and deceitful.” As a doctor charged with making the

Peyssonnel’s era include [Des Gouges], Réponse à la critique insérée au Journal des sçavans du Lundy 21 décembre 1705

(Paris, 1706), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9762998m, pp. 2-3; Joseph Chambon, Principes de physique, rapportez

à la médecine pratique, & autres traictez sur cet art, Par M. Chambon, cy-devant Medecin de Jean Sobieski, Roy de

Pologne (Paris, 1711), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9781306j/, pp. 215-17. 34 FR ANOM COL C7A10, ff. 201-208. 4 mars 1728. Procès-verbal le resultat de la visite des Personnes soupçonnées

de Lepre dans l’Isle Grande Terre Guadeloupe fait par le Medecin du Roy et par les Chirurgiens commis par ordre du Roi,

[hereafter Procès-verbal] f. 207v. C’est ainsi que le vieux Mr. Paulin nous l'a déclaré L’on voit que les autres ont eté pres

par la communication avec des Negresses lepreuses, surtout dans le commencement que la Maladie etoit très cachée… Ce

qui est très probable, puis que nous avons vû plusieurs enfans Mulâtres nes de Negresses Lepreuses. 35 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, f. 259. Quoiqu'il en soit, cette Maladie a eû des progrès et dans cette visite

que nous venont de faire nous avons visitée 256 personnes soupçonnées, seavoir 89 Blancs, 47 Mulatres libres, 120

Negres parmi lesquels nous avons trouvé 22. Blancs six Mulatres et 97 Negres. The high percentage of confirmed cases

among black sufferers could perhaps be attributed to these shared preconceptions or hastier examinations.

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9762998m

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9781306j/f257


12

correct diagnosis for each individual on his list, he had little patience for such lies.36 In this first

voluminous set of documents about leprosy from 1728, Bordegaraye seems to react with similar scorn for

Peyssonnel’s supposed lack of attention to facts. But the anger Bordegaraye expressed belies a deeper

sentiment than outrage over learning/semantics. The resulting awakening—a sensibility attuned to

popular fears about leprosy—can be seen at both at both the individual and institutional levels.

Even before he arrived in Guadeloupe to begin his commission, Peyssonnel may have been

uncertain about his skills and learning. We don’t know if he had any texts to use for reference during that

first examination, given that he allegedly borrowed a personal compilation of “some of the symptoms…

about the Leprosy of the ancients” from his colleague Bordegaraye during his ship’s first berth in

Martinique.37 Even though he was received in Guadeloupe as a valued member of the community, the

person to put the island’s habitants at ease with his impartial expertise, he may have wondered if others

would judge him or question his skills. After all, he had studied medicine in the tiny university in Aix-en-

Provence, not the celebrated one in Paris; he had spent more time writing about his observations of

maritime life than practicing medicine.38 He may have ruminated on the fallout of the 1720 plague in

Marseille, how some doctors had blamed him for spreading panic (though of course it was justified).39 He

36 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, f. 204. …presque tous êtoient rusés, trompeurs, attentifs à nous deguiser

leurs maux, ou à nous donner de mauvaises excuses sur la cause de leurs Ulceres et de leurs playes. La plupart disoit que

c'êtoient les Rats qui leurs devoroient les pieds, et que leurs Ulceres provenoient des brulures. 37 FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f. 214v. Je me souviens que ce Cinquieme [article] n’est qu’une

Enumeration d’une partie des symptomes que j’ay Ecrit de la Lespre des anciens qu’il a tiré de mon Raport que je luy ay

preté et qu’il a Copié avant d’aller a la Guadeloupe… Bordegaraye also argued that Peyssonnel had simply copied this

report, failing to give his colleague credit for having compiled the information. Yet it is clear that he had done much more

extensive research by the time he wrote a treatise dated two months after his initial observations. See ANFr MarG 102,

no. 102. Traité de la Lepre à la Guadeloupe. Par M. Peyssonel. 25 May 1728, Peyssonnel cited Antoine Augustin Calmet,

Benedictine living authority on the “leprosy of the Jews” and biblical references; C14 surgeon Guy de Chauliac; Girolamo

Fracastoro, Thomas Syndenham (1680); RIVIERE on scurvy; a religious treatise in Latin, Sacerdotalé manualé

Rothomagenlis (1640); historians on the mal de Naples/French disease; 38 Indeed, Peyssonnel’s own father had presided over the jury that confirmed his bachelor’s degree in medicine in

1718 (Rampal, « Une relation inédite du voyage en Barbarie,” p. 12). His qualifying thesis can be found at the British

Library, General Reference Collection 1179.d.1.(3.) Jean-Andre de Peyssonnel, Quæstiones medicæ theorico-practicæ

propositæ a Cl. viris D. D. F. de Saint Martin et D. D. L. de Saint Legier, quas ... propugnare conabitur J. A. de

Peyssonnel... præside C. de Peyssonnel ... pro licentiatu acquirendo [Marseille, 1718]. 39 Jean-Baptiste Bertrand, Relation historique de tout ce qui s’est passé à Marseille pendant la dernière peste

(Marteau, 1723), p. 46-47. « Mr Peissonel, accablé des infirmités de l'age, se décharge de ce travail sur son fils, jeune

Medecin qui n étoit pas encore agréé, Ce jeune homme ne prévoyant pas les consequences repandit la terreur dans toute

la Ville & publia par tout que la peste étoit dans tous les quartiers. Il l'écrit de même dans les Villes voisines qui prirent


13

seems to have known little about leprosy, having noted previously that the malady “had gradually

[insensiblement] come to an end” since its “ravages” in Europe following its introduction by Crusaders.

“[Today],” he remarked, “one hardly sees any Lepers.”40 Indeed, even in introducing himself in the

official commission, one gets the sense that Peyssonnel wanted to bolster his prestige and make sure the

local officials knew about his other skills: it was recorded that he was a “Doctor of Medicine,

Correspondent with the Royal Academies of Science in Paris and Montpellier, Member of that of

Marseille, Royal Physician-Botanist, previously sent by his Majesty to the Barbary Coast, [and] Royal

Pensioner employed by his Majesty in the Island of Guadeloupe and its dependences.”41

Yet the newly-arrived Royal Physician-Botanist [&c…] also had reason to feel fairly secure once

he learned more details of his official commission, especially the news that he would be assisted by two

surgeons chosen by the local Assembly—one had practiced for 40 years, and both had been officially

registered on the island of Guadeloupe under a new licensing system initiated within the past year.42

These men could serve as witnesses to his propriety and the justice of his medical discernment, and would

work with him to “receive the declarations of people suspected of Leprosy, both those made to us and

aussi l'alarme et S'interdirent tout commerce avec Marseille: c'est en consequence de ces lettres que le Parlement de

Provence rendît cet arrêt fulminant le 1 Juillet par lequel il défend toute communication entre les habitans de la Province

& ceux de Marseille sous peine de la vie. ». 40 [Peyssonnel,] La Contagion de la Peste Expliquée, et les moyens de s’en preserver (Marseille, 1722), p. 3. …dans

le temps que les Troupes Chrêtiennes furent a la Conquête de al Terre Saint, que les Soldats se trouverent infectés de la

Lepre qu’ils portent en Europe, ou ell fit d’abord de grands ravages, & ou elle a insensiblement fini; car à peine voit-ou

aujourd’huy des Lepreux… 41 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, f. 201r. Nous Noble Maitre Jean André de Peyssonnel Docteur en

Medecine correspondant des Academies Royales des Sciences de Paris et de Montpellier, Membre de celle de Marseille,

Medecin Botaniste du Roy cy-devant envoyé par sa Majesté aux Côtes de Barbarie, Pensionnaire du Roy entretenu par sa

Majesté dans l'Isle Guadeloupe et dependances… That is not to say that he lacked real support and esteem: Peyssonnel

found patronage in well-known figures like Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (an Italian comte and fellow lover of maritime

history), Minimist friar Louis Feuillée (an astronomer and botanist), Claude Dodard, premier médecin du roi, and the

Abbé Bignon (who had supported Peyssonnel’s stature as a correspondent to the Académie des sciences in Paris,

recommending him for the trip to Barbary). In addition to his anonymous 1722 Contagion de la Peste Expliquée, the

budding scientist had published one natural history treatise on the subject prior to his voyage to Guadeloupe. Jean-André

Peyssonnel, Essay de physique, ou Conjectures fondées sur quelques observations qui peuvent conduire à la connoissance

& à l'explication des courans de la mer Méditerranée: Par le Sr Peyssonnel, (Marseille, 1726),

https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb31097504t. 42 In the 1720s, the French colonies were charged with a reform of their medical system, requiring newly-arrived

surgeons, physicians, and pharmacists to undergo a preliminary examination before being officially licensed; those who

had been already practicing were required to prove the efficacy of their remedies. FR ANOM C7A10 F° 136. 15 juin 1727.

Exécution de l’ordonnance concernant la police des chirurgiens de l’île. Examen à leur faire passer.

https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb31097504t


14

required by parish priests, surgeons, and Notables, as well as those uncovered by persons of all estates

and conditions, purely and freely under [a vow of] secrecy.”43 Together they would weigh the evidence

and report their observations, fairly and impartially—and then present them to the government. These

observations were formally recorded and signed as a procès-verbal, though it seems likely they were later

revised in the face of the subsequent storm of critique from Martinique.44

When Bordegaraye read the group’s preliminary report from the neighboring island, he was

livid—and laid all its faults at Peyssonnel’s feet.45 Some of the vitriol came from the teams’ very real

inability to understand the causes of this mysterious, multi-symptom ailment. In one sentence, the

procès-verbal affirmed that the leprosy on the islands “is contagious and hereditary,” yet elsewhere they

could not account for the fact that they had seen married couples living together, “one healthy and the

other infected,” and in other cases they had

seen entire families infected; where almost all the children of a leprous Mother or Father fall

insensibly [insensiblement] into Leprosy, although we have seen in many families one healthy,

the other sick, the Father dead of Leprosy and [his] Children grow old without any effect.

They had done no more than to admit the truth: “We have not been able to find any certain Rule to know

when, and at what age this sickness becomes perceptible” in cases of children of those diagnosed as

leprous.46 Bordegaraye read these general comments and declared himself incredulous that no clearer

43 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, ff. 201-201v. Nous nous sommes transportés dans l'Isle Grand terre

Guadeloupe… pour nous faire prêter main forte et faire apeller de son autorité les personnes soupçonnées et les obliger

de se soumettre à la visite ordonnée après avoir reçu les depositions et Declarations des personnes soupçonnées de Lepre,

tant celles qui nous ont été faites et requises d'autorité déposées par les curés, par les chirurgiens, et par les Notables que

celles qui ont été réveillées par des personnes de tout etat et conditions purement et librement sous le secret, avons visité

et verbalisé sur l'Etat de toutes les personnes tant blancs ou Mulâtres ou Negres tant dénoncées qu'autres venus sans

denonciation, lesquels Procès-Verbaux ont eté en registrés et signés par Nous.. 44 The term procès-verbal today is translated as “meeting minutes,” but in this context it indicates a fuller, more

detailed summary report. 45 I should note that in reading Bordegaraye’s point-by-point refutation of the document he read, it appears it was not

the exact same procès-verbal which made its way to the Colonial Ministry in France, a point to which I will return (IN

FOOTNOTEXXX) 46 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, ff. 205-06. L’on voit des femmes qui ont cohabité avec leurs maris, des

Maris avec leurs femmes pendant leurs maladies, tandis [as] que l'un est sain et l'autre infecté. Nous voyons des familles

se communiquer et vivre avec des lepreux, et tous n'être pas infectés, ni en avoir que peu…. Nous n’avons pû trouver

aucune Regle assurée pour scavoir quand et a quel âge cette maladie se fait apercevoir aux personnes nées des Peres

infectés


15

observations of time had been included—was cohabitation in 20 or 30 years enough? “Read the whole

point and you will see the Contradictions, the uncertainty of the author, and the Bias shown in drawing on

the report of others to elude the difficulty he has proving what he advances.”47 At another point,

Bordegaraye questioned the report’s basic description of how the first warning spots appeared on the skin

of both white and black sufferers, noting that perhaps Peyssonnel even lacked the proper function of his

visual sensibility, perhaps blocked by disgust—Bordegaraye noted that “these spots on black skin are not

very agreeable to the eyes of a newcomer.”48 As would become apparent, Bordegaraye had hoped

Peyssonnel would concur with his own pre-considered diagnosis—that many of the people suspected of

leprosy were instead suffering from a new kind of “land scurvy” [scorbut de terre], primarily owing to a

bad “disposition of the air, and the coarseness of food” available in that region of Guadeloupe.49 All the

fuss about leprosy, he believed, was nothing more than a fear that seduced “weak minds” [foible esprits],

something that Peyssonnel, if he was a “capable savant,” a “Philosophe sensible,” must refute.50

But which kind of people would suffer as a result of Peyssonnel’s supposed mistakes?

Bordegaraye’s vitriol cannot be explained as just a matter of professional standards, though he couched

much of his critique in that language. Indeed, the emotional language he used to express concern about

the “violent and tyrannical remedy” of exile on Désirade, combined with his long tenure as a royal

physician in Martinique, suggests that he may have known some of the families implicated, and feared for

47 FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f. 218. Lisés tout l’article vous Verrés les Contradictions, les

incertitudes de l’auteur, Et le Biais qu’il prend En l’apuyant sur le Raport D’autruy pour Eluder la difficulté qu’il a de

prouve ce qu’il avance 48 FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f. 212v. …ces taches sur une peau noire ne sont pas bien agreables aux

yeux d’un nouveau venu dans le pay… 49 FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f. 224. Qu’on ne soit donc pas surpris de voir a la grandeterre

Gaudeloupe des epaissements dans le sang, des ulceres chancreux des pourritures, et des grangrenes dans les parties ;

puisques suivant la disposition de l’air, et la grossierté des alimens dont on use pour la plupart… 50 FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f. 209v-210. Tandis qu’un habile homme Scavant, prudent et sage en

empeché les progrés tan du mal que du renom que c’est insensiblement ce qio de dan tous les foibles esprits, C’est un

bruit qui seduisant le peuple, l’oblige de recourir aux puissances, de penetrer jusqu’au Trome [sic, i.e. Throne] pour

interrompre Sa majesté de leurs craintes, et luy demander secours contre des Compatriotes


16

their futures. He would be right in his concern. The rules for the new leper colony were harsh, for as

Guadeloupe’s Council had ruled:

…we permit anyone to shoot those declared lepers who, after the embarkation [to Désirade], are

discovered in the highways or in habitations (whether cleared or uncleared), enjoining the

commanders of each district to make accurate searches of those who could have retreated into the

woods, and to have them shot.51

Bordegaraye defended his “Compatriots” against their sentence of exile, exclaiming that they

“better merited Compassion than the Extreme Violence that would be necessary to tear them away from

the bosom of their country and to relegate them to a deserted island, forever Distant from their family,

friends, wives, and Children.”52 Yet at no point did Bordegaraye seem to be concerned for enslaved

couples and families, many of whom had already been torn from their homes in West Africa to face a life

of exile, violence, and a stubborn lack of compassion.

In fact, it was French insensibility towards such suffering that makes their preoccupation with the

nature of leprosy’s key symptom—the inability to feel their bodies’ disintegration—so notable.

Peyssonnel and his team had described how those who everyone believed leprous nonetheless “declare to

us that they have no Incommodities nor pain; on the contrary, they eat, drink, and sleep well, and can

perform all their natural functions.”53 The members of the diagnostic party tested this lack of natural

sensibility by “pushing Pins into the hands of some patients without them feeling anything [sans qu’ils

51 FR ANOM COL C7A10, f. 245v. …permettons a toutes personnes de fusiller ceux declares ladres qui, apres

l’embarquement, et seronts presentes sur les grandes chemins, et dans les habitations defrichées ou non defrichées.

enjoiygnons aux commandans des quartiers de faire des perquisitions exactes de ceux qui pourriernt se retirer dans les

bois, et de les faire fusiller. This law remained on the books at least through the early nineteenth century—see M. Durand-

Molard, Code de la Martinique, Nouvelle édition (1807-1814), p. 314. Yet it seems that officials were loath to carry out

this most draconian order : ANOM COL C8A 40, f. 28, Letter 25 janvier 1729, Intendant d’Orgeville: quelque'vns qui se

sont cachez dans les bois, lesquels M de Maisoncelle nous marque qu’il va faire fusiller, nous luy avons ordonné de ne

point le faire; d'empescher seulement qu’il sn’entrent dans les bourgs 52 FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f. 210. …interrompre Sa majesté de leurs craintes, et luy demander

secours contre des Compatriotes meritent plutôt la Compassion que l’Extreme Violence qu’on veut employer pour leur

arracher du seing de leur patrie et les releguer dans une isle deserte, Eloignés pour jamais de leurs parens, amis, femmes,

et Enfants” 53 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, f. 201v. Que tous les Malades que nous avons visités, n'avoient aucune

fievre, et qu'ils nous declaroient n'avoir aucunes Incommodités ni douleur; au contraire bien manger bien boire et bien

dormir, et faire toutes leurs fonctions naturelles: ce qui êtoit confirmé par l'Embonpoin qui parroissoit en eux, lors même

que leur maladie êtoit la plus confirmée.


17

l’ayant senti].” Peyssonnel continued: “we were told that the sick died thus little by little, falling all into

mortification and their extremities detaching from their bodies, without feeling any kind of notable pain…

they live thus tranquilly (if one can say that) for many years.”54 This unsettling observation was one of the

places where Bordegaraye pushed back most forcefully, expressing incredulity that Peyssonnel had

himself undertaken the experiment, and that this painless, slow, and yet seemingly irreversible death was

even possible, for:

Any Break in the Continuity between the membranes, tendons, and Fleshy parts cannot occur

without Extreme pain; the decay, the Gangrene presupposes a distention of the Vessels and the

fibers by the Shortening of the [body] matter, from which can Result fevers, inflammation, pain,

tingling sensations, tightness, a tearing of the parts thereof, And notably compromise the health

and the integrity of one’s [bodily] functions.

Bordegaraye wondered why Peyssonnel had given credit to the “hearsay” of his patients given that this

was the “most desperate [part] of this malady,” and insisted that he could prove to anyone that such

widespread lack of sensation were more reminiscent of the symptoms of the “land scurvy.”55 As to the

observation that the leprosy sufferers he saw appeared (in senses other than the exterior) to be in good

health, Bordegaraye drew attention to the last line of Peyssonnel’s judgment—one neatly excised later by

colonial officials: “We can only reconcile nor explain this Enigma by admitting that everything is

54 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, f. 203r-v. Parties tellement que nous avons passé des Epingles à travers la

main de certains malades sans qu'ils l'ayant senti. Enfin on nous a dit que les malades perissoient ainsi peu à peu, tout

tombant en mortification et les membres se detachant d'eux mêmes, sans qu'ils ressentissent aucune vive douleur,

continuant à bien faire leurs fonctions naturelles. / Les malades vivent ainsi tranquilement si on le peut dire, plusieurs

années; 55 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, ff. 214v-215. Comme il est pareillement contre toute Verité qu’il

ait luy meme passé des Epingles au Travers des mains, sans que les malades ayent Ressentis aucune douleur, et je Suis

pres de faire Voir le Contraire a ceux qui en seront Curieux sur le plus desesperé dans cette maladie : puisqu’il [auroit]

un peu après qu’il ne Sçait que par ouy dire que les malades perissent peu a peu Tombant En pourriture… Tant de

Solution de Continuitê dans les parties qui sont membraneuses, tendineuses, et Charnues, ne Se peuvent faire sans

d’Extremes douleurs ; la pourriture, la Gangrene presuposent une distention des Vaisseaux et des fibres par le Sejour de

la matiere, ce qui ne peut arriver sans Causer fievres, inflammations, douleurs, par le picotement, tiraillement,

dechirement de ses parties, Et [sain interesse] notablement l’integrité de toutes les fonctions… [Ils] jugeant par les

symptomes qu’ay me Rapportoir que C’estois une Scorbut de terre maltraitté Et negligé…


18

mysterious in Guadeloupe…” to which he responded with another zinger: “Is this a physician instructed

in his science?”56

These heated written exchanges speak to the emotional communities beyond the medical world to

the colonial realm, which was itself enmeshed in other nodes of tension. The pròces-verbal submitted by

Peyssonnel’s team was charged with supporting the government’s role as arbiters of fact and the power of

the law. The procès-verbal’s seriousness helped in that effort, in that they confirmed that the malady on

Guadeloupe:

is contagious and hereditary, nonetheless this contagion has not the character nor the liveliness

and venom of the Plague, the smallpox, or even that of ring-worm, rashes, scabies, the itch, and

other cutaneous maladies; for of that were the case, the American Colonies would be absolutely

and completely lost.57

Colonial officials faced between preserving the body politic (and the future of France’s overseas

plantations), and preserving the reputations, lives and fortunes of individual whites presumed tainted by

this racialized scourge, and perhaps unjustly abandoned to die alone on a desert island. The government in

the French islands were faced with a difficult task, for they could not do what Peyssonnel appeared to

have suggested, at least once—to suspend the slave trade from Africa until there was time to determine

the regions most affected by leprosy, Bordegaraye (and likely many Guadeloupean officials) were quite

alarmed at this notion, wondering if “he wants to ruin Commerce and destroy the islands.”58 Instead, the

56 FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f. 211. il visitoit apparement les gens sains ou la netteté des fonctions

repondoir de l’Integrité des parties qui pourrissoient d’heureux sucs pour Entretenir cet Embonpoint [sans] fievres,

douleurs, incommodités &c, Mais lisez les derniers mots de l’article Lors meme que la maladie Etoi la plus Confirmée.

J’ay on ne peut Concilier n’y expliquer cette Enigme qu’en avouant que tout est misterieux a la Guadeloupe : que la santé

Et la maladie y sont un melange si proportionné qu’il n’y a que le S. Peysonnel qui puisse de brouiller [?]. Réflexion:

Peut on sui cette histoire prendre aucunes resolutions Et donner aucun autre ; est ce un medecin instruit dans sa science ;

qui develope les circonstances les plus cach[é ?] et met En Evidence des faits Certains dont on puisse [trouver ? ] les

lumieres qu’on cherche pour s’Eclaircir de la vérité… 57 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Procès Verbal, f. 204v, est contagieux et hereditaire cependant cette contagion n’est pas

du caractere, ni n’a pas la vivacité et le venin de la Contagion de la Peste, de la petite Verole ni même celle des Dartres,

gratelle, rogne, galle et autres maladies cutannées, car cela êtoit, les Colonies de l’Amerique seroient absolument et

entierement perduës… Translations for other ailments from Louis Chambaud, The treasure of the French and English

languages 7th ed. (London, 1786), pp. 5-15. https://books.google.com/books?id=WowNAAAAQAAJ 58 This suggestion in particular seems to have been effaced from the official Procèses Verbaux that made their way

into the metropolitan Colonial Office, another sign of institutional silencing. FR ANOM C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, f.

220v-221. On ne faut plus aller chercher des Negres en Guinée; C'est un commerce pernicieux et nos habitations

s'exploiterons d'elle et memes; il veut apparement ruiner le Commerce et detruire les isles…

https://books.google.com/books?id=WowNAAAAQAAJ


19

final copy of the pròces-verbal sent to France removed these suggestions. It also emphasized separate

origins for the disease in neutral, reassuring language for readers who might be worried about contagion

from Africans. Their report claimed at the end that the disease was brought from Guinée by captive

Africans who had progressed to more advanced symptoms in the islands. But “among the infected

Whites and Mulattoes,” they traced the origins to three separate families and one patient zero—a

“misérable malade” who had taken refuge after the English drove the French out of St. Christophe in the

1690s.59 In this strategy, Peyssonnel signed onto the distinction Bordegaraye had made about the role that

poverty and misfortune played in that some “unhappy whites” regularly suffered from to diseases the

“prudent and learned man” could avoid because he know how to “conduct himself according to rules in

the torrid zone.”60 Both Peyssonnel’s discretion on the matter of sexual transmission and Bordegarayes’

charged emotions regarding a disease supposedly brought from Africa and primarily affecting enslaved

people, reveal an underlying moral tension that is reminiscent of Madeline Doby and Doris Garraway’s

findings in their studies of literary suppressions regarding sex in colonial contexts.

Knowing that word would get back to France if they tried to completely squash the controversy,

local officials instead drew on the voice of a calming third party to resolve the dispute, a man whose

erudite and measured report struck Gov. Mont Saint Remy et Mesnier as “the most prudent and

moderate” by comparison to both Peyssonnel (who was “too frightened”) and Bordegaraye (who seemed

“too relaxed”).61 Carrel’s calm tone and balanced analysis maintained the status quo, approving the plans

already in place to begin transporting those declared afflicted by leprosy to the island of La Désirade.

59 Procès Verbal, FR ANOM COL C7A10, f. 207-207v, 295. The movement of leprosy from St. Christophe to other

French islands may have been real, as refugees from that island were suspected of being at the root of a threatening

“epidemic” of leprosy in St. Domingue in 1711. Thanks to Aaron Olivas for this reference. FR ANOM COL C9A9, 22 Dec

1711. Jean-Pierre de Charitte au comte de Pontchartrain (Le Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue), f. 177r-v. 60 Bordegaraye, Remarques, FR ANOM COL C7A10, f. 225. et quelque malheureux blancs attaqués de ce mal

n’Etoient pas contrebalancés par l’aisance, la propreté, la facilité, de se faire secourir et l’attention que chaque homme

prudent et sage doit avoir pour se conduire selon les regles dans cette zone torride 61 CITATION: believes Peyssonnel "too frightened," Bordegaraye "too relaxed" (although his idea for a hospital

good), and Carrel "the most prudent and moderate." "One should make a big distinction between a quick and sudden sharp

contagion like the plague, and such a slow contagion and a slow contagion like that attributed to this leprosy";

recommends that patients should be asked if they had scurvy-like symptoms or "commerce avec des femmes gastées ou

suspectees"


20

Several months later, the Compte de Maurepas, currently the Secretary of the Marine, found in the reams

of reports that followed this incident a repeated, soothing phrase—“everyone seems pleased” with the

decisions made in Guadeloupe.62

Confidence, Exuberance, and Repression

François-Joseph Ruffy, the second of our besieged French medical professionals, found himself

attacked for excessive pride and confidence rather than fear and insensibility. Much less is readily known

about this master surgeon living in Fort Saint-Pierre, Martinique in the 1740s, given that he had no

official position like the many crown-sponsored physicians and surgeons whose lives are at least partially

recoverable in colonial archives. For the moment, let us presume he was the fourth son of Louis-Antoine

Ruffi (from a long line of historians and city patrons of Provence).63 If so, his father was one of the

representatives on the board of Marseille’s hospital of Saint Lazare (the patron saint of leprosy), which

had been transformed in the late seventeenth century to a house of confinement for the mad (les insensés)

and sometimes also a jail.64 Ruffy’s reasons for leaving France are unclear, but we do know he arrived in

Martinique sometime before May 174, the first date mentioned in a long memoire d’observation he

intended to read publicly in defense of his professional reputation. This memoire serves as a primary

record of Ruffy’s roller-coaster of sentiments relating to leprosy, and is augmented by copies of various

pròces-verbaux relating to that slander charge, which led to an additional lawsuit and summary judgment

by local judges—a not-insubstantial 80 pages. Ruffy practiced for at least two years in Saint Pierre,

treating many patients and carrying out post-mortem autopsies (including many on slaves), during which

time his mind was hard at work, building up what he thought was a well-reasoned, scientifically-sound

62 FR ANOM COL C7A10, Maurepas, secrétaire d’État à la Marine, à Helvetius de Fontainebleau, 28 septembre 1728;

Mémoire sur la Lèpre, 20 sept 1728, ff. 289, 292 ; f. 275v. tout le monde a paru content 63 Antoine de Ruffi (Marseille, 1607-1689), historien de Marseille ; Louis Antoine de Ruffi (1657- 1724),

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Antoine_de_Ruffi [find better citation]. 64 When the hospital had previously been used for leprosy, only 3-5 people per year remained by mid C17, so they

began taking in other “incurables” in a different section; hospital incorporated in the Hôtel Dieu in 1696 by royal patent

(39-41, 45); https://books.google.com/books?id=aOzaAAAAMAAJ

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Antoine_de_Ruffi

https://books.google.com/books?id=aOzaAAAAMAAJ


21

argument about diseases that could lead to leprosy. Like Peyssonnel, when he began to use the new term

he favored, acheminement à la lépre,65 he found himself at the center of a firestorm of unintended

professional consequences that vexed the medical and merchant community of Saint Pierre, Martinique.66

Ruffy began his speech that fateful day by explaining his history—he had been a skeptic about

the rumors of leprosy in the Antilles: “When I arrived in this country, leprosy was to me nothing but a

chimera, or at least I thought that it was nothing more than the pox brought to its final perfection.”67 (Thus

we see again how the link between leprosy and syphilis remained symbolically potent.) His first glimpse

of a “reputed leper” was a “poor young man” named Pierre Aubert. Aubert had lived for four years in a

“negro hut” [une case à nègres] outside the city limits. When Ruffy first paid him a visit, Aubert

reportedly “begged him to have pity on him and to give him some remedies.” Ruffy agreed to take the

case out of charity, thinking he might also learn more about the roots of these kinds of skin conditions

[affections de la peau], which he believed was actually a “hypochondriacal affliction”68 which had

overwhelmed Aubert’s body.69 To both their delights, Aubert responded so well to treatment that within

65 Several times in this article, I translated the term acheminement à la lepre with the literal/colloquial “on the road to

leprosy” [from the noun chemin], but it could also be translated as “pre-disposition to leprosy,” “preparation for leprosy,”

or “a pre-leprosy condition.” The sense of being “on the path to” leprosy better fits my understanding of the anxieties

wrapped up in a progressive series of maladies whose final destination was the most-feared disease of its time. Le

Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1694), t. 1 ACHEMINEMENT. s. m. v. Disposition, preparation. C’est un grand

acheminement à la paix, à ce mariage f Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. Quatrième Édition. (1762), t.1,

ACHEMINEMENT. s.m. Ce qui est propre à faire parvenir à la fin qu’on se propose, disposition, préparation. C’est un grand

acheminement à la paix. Pour acheminement au traité, on résolut, &c. 66 We know that these types of professional conflicts, especially between physicians and surgeons, quickly became

personal in an economy of rivalry for paying clients, or to protect one’s reputation. See Pablo Gómez, The Experiential

Caribbean, PP##; and Céline Ronsseray, « Un destin guyanais : Jacques-François Artur, 1er médecin du roi à Cayenne au

XVIIIe siècle » Annales de Normandie 53, no. 4 (2003) : 358-59. www.persee.fr/doc/annor_0003-

4134_2003_num_53_4_1455 67 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Memoire d’observation (hereafter Ruffy, Memoire), filed under Correspondance of

Champigny de Noroy, 25 octobre 1743. Vives plaintes de Ruffy, maître chirurgien à Saint-Pierre contre les sieurs Garnier,

médecin du roi, Jouneaux et Lartigue, chirurgiens à Saint-Pierre, qui le persécutent et veulent le chasser de l'île. Mémoire

d’observation, Extrait des registres du greffe civil et criminel de la jurisdiction royale du fort Saint Pierre de

l’isle Martinique, 20 Oct 1742. p. 4/Image 110 of digitized document at

http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ark:/61561/zn401xxuqvh. Quand je suis arrivé dans ce pays, la ladrerie

n’étoit pour moy qu’une chimère ou du moins je pensoit que ce n’étoit autre chose que la vérole parvenüe à son degré de

perfection. 68 Need to be able to explain what this means—not hypochondria in the modern sense. 69 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 6/Image 111. …il y avoit un pauvre jeune homme reputé ladre

et sequestré depuis quatre ans dans une case à nègres située près du grand chemin qui conduit du cimetière de la paroisse

Saint Pierre à la batterie des Pères Jesuittes. L’ayant visité je luy trouvay quantité de signes extérieurs que je n’avois

jamais vû et je ne devinay point la cause de son existence mais l’atant interrogé sur ce qui s’étoit passé dans les premiers

http://www.persee.fr/doc/annor_0003-4134_2003_num_53_4_1455

http://www.persee.fr/doc/annor_0003-4134_2003_num_53_4_1455

http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ark:/61561/zn401xxuqvh


22

three weeks it appeared “he was on the road [s’acheminement] to total healing”—indeed, he was soon

after able to travel to the island of Sainte Lucie where he had family, intending to work there. With so

much success in this case, Ruffy considered that Aubert must have been misdiagnosed, since true leprosy

was known to be incurable. Indeed, he claimed to have also cured a woman named Zabeth Daufiné in just

a month, though she also had been legally declared infected with the disease. All signs seemed to support

Ruffy’s initial impression that “leprosy was nothing but a phantom,” and that other related diseases (like

syphilis) were well known and were treatable. He began to write down some of his theories and shared his

thoughts with those he thought would appreciate his insights and treatment regimes, one of them a fellow

surgeon and member of the Académie de sciences in Paris.70

Ruffy shared the exact day when he came to feel both shock and elation—it was a true conversion

experience. On the 4th of October, 1741, everything he thought he knew was suddenly “cast in a new

light.” He had been called to visit another man who was, like Aubert, sequestered in a “negro hut.” The

man had had lived for several years in this domicile, exiled from the rest of his family, with only an

enslaved woman allowed to bring him those things necessary for his daily sustenance and care.71 Ruffy

confessed that although he was accustomed to “disagreeable” sights given his profession, “the aspect” of

this 45-year-old man left him astonished and speechless.72 The man’s skin was “very foul… colored

temps de sa maladie et ensuitte sur son état présent, je reconnus que ce jeune homme étoit affligé d’une affection

hipocondriaque à un point qu’il en étoit accablé ; il me pria d’avoir pitié de luy et de luy donner quelques remèdes pour le

soulager ; comme il s’agissoit de faire une charité je pensay que de luy guérir son affection hipocondriaque ce seroit luy

rendre un très grand office et que cela me donneroit lieu d’observer ce que deviendroit touttes les affections de la peau. 70 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, pp. 7-8/Image 111-112. C’est sur cette observation et sur celle de

Zabeth Dauphiné que je fis le mémoire en forme de cette addressée à M. Trouvé ou j’examine cette matière et que

j’envoyay à M. Morand chirurgien de l’académie par M. le marquis de Champigny… je l’étois que la ladrerie n’étoit

qu’un phantôme la maladie vénérienne étant connüe… I’ve been unable to find any information on the first man, M.

Trouvé. but his reference to M. Morand, who Ruffy referred to as a surgeon of the Academy, is probably Sauveur François

MORAND (1697-1773), a founding member of the French Académie de chirurgie and elected to the Académie de

sciences in 1723. For more on Morand, see “Éloge de Mr Morand,” Histoire de l’Academie royale des sciences (Paris,

1777), pp. 99-117; and the list of Morand’s known publications at https://data.bnf.fr/fr/12264634/sauveur-

francois_morand/. 71 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, pp. 8-9/Image 112. Le 4e octobre 1741 je fuis conduit sur le

revers d’une montagne ou l’on avoit construit une case à nègre, et une plus pettite à côté pour une négresse : le malade

logeoit dans la première, elle étoit très écartée de son habitation ou logeoient sa femme et ses [9] enfants avec lesquels il

n’avoit d’autre commerce que par le canal d’une negresse qui luy portoit sa nourriture et ses autres besoins… 72 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 8/Image 112. Quelqu’habitude que j’aye à voir des malades,

même des plus désagréables, j’avoue qu’à l’aspect de celuy-ci je fus interdit. Beyond something “forbidden,” the word

https://data.bnf.fr/fr/12264634/sauveur-francois_morand/

https://data.bnf.fr/fr/12264634/sauveur-francois_morand/


23

greenish-yellow” and his hairless head had a lion-like aspect as the epidermis had melted from its

fundament. Ruffy described his voice as “hoarse and disagreeable… [his] ears a surprising thickness and

size, studded with large, very hard and thick tubercles.” All over his face and skin could be found reddish-

purple pimples which seemed to move from place to place, and large horny warts on the joints of his

fingers, where it “appeared as if the skin had been scorched or burned” before separating into dry crusts.

Given the importance of insensibility to a leprosy diagnosis, the lack of pain or inflammation in this

process was telling: “the patient said he felt a numbness in his fingers and they became large, and hard,

and he could not make use of them.” His groin was “very swollen ([but] without in any way constricting

the glands).”73 These were, to Ruffy, clearly the signs of leprosy—at the very least, it was not the Pox.

Yet the man had already been treated briefly by another surgeon on the island, who had used

mercury treatments commonly used in cases of syphilis, but the side effects of those “salivations” were

even more grim, for they had burned a hole on the roof of his mouth, which he had to stop up with a wad

of “paper mâché, without which he could neither drink nor eat, nor even speak.” It had also destroyed his

gums, left his mouth ulcerated, and “with such sticky saliva it fatigued him beyond expression.”74 Yet

Ruffy rejected the idea that it could be syphilis, as he trusted his patient’s morals—so much that (out of

interdit at the time could carry a connotation of troubled surprise tending towards speechlessness. Dictionnaire de

l’Académie française (1694), https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/publicdicos/navigate/3/5707/ 73 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 8/Image 112. …il avoit la peau fort sale, et le coloris jaune

tirant sur le verd. Il s’en separoit continuellement une portion d’épiderùe en forme de son fin qui blanchissoit l’eau et la

rendoit liùoneuse … Il avoit la voix rude et désagréable, la langue toutte ridée, et paroissoit avoir été autrefois fort

grosse / il avoit sur le visage comme sur le reste du corps , de gros boutons d’un rouge violet qui disparoissoient quelques

fois dans un endroit, et reparoissioent dans d’autres, les oreilles étoient d’une grandeur et d’une grosseur surprenante,

garnies de gros tubercules fort durs et fort épais…. Il y avoit certaines [??] galles ou exautêmes larges comme un ongle,

plus souvent sur les apophises des articulations des doigts, sans inflammation, supuration, ni douleur qui paroissoient

comme si la peau avoit été écorchée ou brulée dans cet endroit, il s’en séparoit de petittes croutes seiches comme si c’eut

été du sang seiché et il s’en formoit de nouvelles : le malade disoit ressentir un engourdissement dans les doigts qui

étoient gros durs et dont il ne pouvoit faire usage… La verge, le prépuce et le scrotum étoient fort gonflez sans que le

gland fut aucunement étranglé… 74 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, pp. 9-11/Image 112-13. il y en avoit trois ou qutre qu’un

chirurgien du fort Royal luy avoit donné le flux de bouche par les frictions mercuriales, croyant que c’étoit une affaire

vénérienne : ce qui luy fut très fatal car outre qu’il s’en fallut pue qu’il ne succombât il n’en tira aucun avantage pour sa

maladie et il luy resta au contraire de très facheuses incommoditez, comme la perforation de la voute du palais, ou il y

avoir une ouverture à passer le doigt ; le malade la fermoit avec un tampon de papier maché, sans lequel il ne pouvoit ni

boir ni manger ni parler : la luette s’étoit totalement fondüe, par la violente impression du mercure et le fond du gosier en

étout resté entièrement défiguré. l’intérieur de la bouche étoit pareillement ulcéré mais surtout les gencives qui étoient en

partie détruittes... le malade rendoit continuellement une salive si gluante qu’elle le fatigoit au dela de l’expression.

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/publicdicos/navigate/3/5707/


24

respect), he never even named the man: “the reputation of this man was very good [en très bonne

odeur]… [and was] of the highest reason [des plus raisonnables]”. What behaviors convinced Ruffy that

this man deserved such circumspection?

he told me he had never drank in his life, nor had he had any venereal accident; his wife, with

whom he had lived a very long time, was strong and healthy, as were the three girls that I saw, the

youngest almost of marriable age [presque nubile]. He had consented to be sequestered after his

‘mouth flux’ was suspected to be from leprosy.75

The man appeared the epitome of visceral shame: “the eyes of the world on him seemed unbearable, he

couldn’t suffer anyone to look at him.”76

Yet despite the grim aspect of his patient, and the presumable incurable nature of leprosy, Ruffy

bracketed the ugliness of his patients’ condition with repeated claims that this was “the happiest day of

his life.” Ruffy noted in this narrative how his own sensibility was activated on multiple levels: “I was

filled up with compassion to see a man abandoned to such unhappiness, and at the same time with

satisfaction to begin to familiarize myself with a malady I had been ignorant of up to that day.”77 Indeed,

this was the moment that clarified Ruffy’s mission to figure out how several ailments common among his

patients in Martinique were related to one another—they were steps on the road to leprosy. Ruffy also

“venture[d] to say” that venereal disease was also on the same road, and felt certain that his colleagues

75 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, pp. 9-10/Image 112-113. il faut expressement observer que la

réputation de cette homme étoit en très bonne odeur, et il passoit pour être des plus raisonnables, il me dit qu’il n’avoit

jamais bu de sa vie, aucun symptôme ni accident vénérien que sa femme avec qu’il avoit habité très longtemps étoit forte

saine ainsy que trois filles que je vis dont la plus pettite étoit presque nubile. Il avoit consenty à se sequestrer depuis son

flux de bouche étant soupçconné de ladrerie…. My translation for the word nubile comes directly from the 1694

Dictionnaire de l’Académie française: Qui a atteint l' âge de se marier. Il ne se dit guere que des filles.

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/publicdicos/navigate/4/1754/ 76 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 12/Image 114. la vüe du monde luy étoit insupportable, et il ne

pouvoit souffrir qu’on le regardoit… 77 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 8/Image 112. Le jour que je visitay ce malade, je le regarde,

ce jour ; comme un des plus heureux de ma vie, il me sembla être éclairé d’une nouvelle lumière, et en effet je trouvay

comme vous l’allez voir, Messieurs, ce que je cherchois depuis si longtemps, c’est-à-dire l’observation de la plus belle ; et

la plus singulière que je pus faire sur cette maladie, puisque c’est elle qui me l’a fait connoitre. FR ANOM COL C8B 10,

N° 22, pp. 14-15/Image 115. Un tel objet me remplit tout à la fois de compassion et de contentement de voir un homme

abandonné a un sort si malheureux et en même temps de commencer à connoitre une maladie dont j’avois ignoré

l’existance jusqu’à ce jour.

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/publicdicos/navigate/4/1754/


25

would be easily convinced by his deductions.78 Fully energized as he treated his new patient, who was

transported to Saint-Pierre for more intensive care, Ruffy began to read more on leprosy and other

disorders related to melancholic humors by several medical authorities (he first consulted Riviere,

Poupart, and Pigray79). Ruffy built on their summaries to posit a connection between leprosy,

hypochondriacal afflictions, and scurvy (Bordegaraye was by this time dead, but the “land scurvy” theory

survived for quite a while). Ruffy’s confidence at seeing these connections was only enhanced by the

delight he felt at seeing his new patient palpably improve [d’une manière très sensible] within the space

of a month: “He was happier, he ate better, his sleep was more tranquil and his [swollen] parts began to

diminish… He went out in the evening far from his lodging to go walking, which he had not been able to

do in a long time.”80 This rapid improvement also boosted Ruffy’s mood, a feeling he described as delight

[je…fus enchanté]: “truly, the satisfaction I had was almost ecstatic, so that I wrote jokingly to someone

that I had never had more pleasure in my life… as how I felt in seeing a leper.”81

78 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 13/Image 114. A présent que nous avons lieu de croire que la

ladrerie est une maladie distincte et différente de la vérole ; nous allons rapporter diverses observations que nous

mettront en état de juger si nous devons la regarder comme telle : mais de ce point je me sens dans l’obligation de ne vous

pas tenir d’avantage dans l’indetermination, puisque la différence du principe, de la cause et de l’effet de ces deux

maladies sont de la même évidence, ce qui est confirmé par diverses observations que nous allons rapporter, et j’ose me

permettre que les raisons qui y seront déduittes seront si plausibles qu’on aura lieu d’être content. [wording here is a bit

confusing—anyone want to help with a better summary/quotation?] 79 Following Ruffy’s citations, I’ve found corresponding medical texts published by Pierre Pigray, Lazare Rivière,

and François Poupart, some in recent editions, others going back to the early 17th century: Pierre Pigray, Epitome des

preceptes de medecine et de chirurgie. Avec ample declaration des remedes propres aux maladies (1624),

http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histmed/medica/page?39959&p=642; La pratique de médecine, avec la théorie de

Lazare Rivière... traduite... en françois par M. F. Deboze... Nouvelle édition, revue, corrigée, sur le latin. (Lyon)-1723 (2

Vols.), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6530225r; [François] Poupart, "Etrange Effets du Scorbut arrivés en Paris en

mil six cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf," Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences ([Paris], 1699), pp. 169-76,

http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32786820s. 80 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, pp. 15-16/Images 115-16. A peine le moins fut-il finy que le

malade se sentit soulagé d’une manière très sensible, il étoit plus gay, il mangeoit mieux ; le sommeil étoit plus tranquile

et les parties commencoient à diminiuer. A la fin du mois de novembre cet homme se trouva si bien que je ne douttay plus

de sa guérison [16] il sortoit le soir et alloit assez loin de son logis pour se promener ce qu’il n’avoit pû faire depuis

longtemps. 81 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 16/Image 116. Dès ce temps-là je ne voyois jamais cet homme

que je ne fus enchanté, et je le dis avec vérité la satisfaction que j’en avois alloit jusqu’au ravissement c’est ce qui m’a fait

pour lors écrire à quelqu’un par plaisanterie que je n’avoit jamais eu de ma vie plus de plaisir à avoir la plus aimable

personne que j’en ressentois à voir un ladre, en effet le succès surpassoit mes espérances.

http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histmed/medica/page?39959&p=642

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6530225r

http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32786820s


26

Yet by the end of that same month Ruffy had to stop treatment as the man’s excretory system was

rapidly failing: in late October, his patient’s urgent bowel movements produced “a quantity of glutinous

matters mixed with blood… and his urine came in such small a quantity and so dark as to resemble the

dregs of coffee, such that I could hardly believe it was urine.”82 Ruffy recommended the man be given

last rites, yet it would take three months before the man finally died. Ruffy’s narrative here becomes

suddenly detached from emotion, void of any feelings of compassion or despair at his patient’s suffering,

or even disappointment in his own professional skills. He only mentioned to his audience that he had

asked to be notified of the man’s death so he could perform an autopsy, “which I thought would be very

interesting, thinking that the internal [results] would be to me just as curious as the [man’s] exterior”

symptoms had been. The result was indeed curious, as Ruffy narrated: “Will you not be surprised,

Messieurs, that when I tell you that I have never opened any cadaver that appeared to me healthier or that

gave me less disgust than this one? Nonetheless, it is true. All the viscera that I examined (one after the

next) were of an incredible beauty.”83

At this point we should pause to remember that Ruffy shared the these colorful stories before an

increasingly hostile audience, all of them gathered at the home of one of the island’s royal physicians,

Guy-André Garnier.84 Among the “several others” also present were two crown-sponsored surgeons and

one Monsieur Souchay, “one of the rich merchants of this country”85—whose protest had first caused

82 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, pp. 16-17/Image 116. Il continua à bien faire jusqu’au 21 octobre

qu’il luy pris une espèce de Thenesme qui me fit interrompre [17] l’usage des remèdes, il rendit avec efforts une quantité

de matières glutineuses meslées de sang le tenesme dégéréna en court de ventre… les urines étoient en petittes quantité et

si noirs qu’elles resembloient à de la lie de caffé ; en un mot elles étoient telles que j’avois peine à croire que ce fût de

l’urine 83 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, pp. 17-18/Images 116-17. je jugeois être fort intéressante,

pensant que le dedans seroit pour moy aussy curieux que le dehors…. Ne serez-vous pas surpris, Messieurs, quand je vous

diray que je ne fis jamais l’ouverture d’aucun cadavre qui me parut plus sain et qui me donna moins de dégoust que celuy

cy ? C’est cependant une vérité. Tous ses viscères que j’examinay l’un après l’autre étoient d’une beauté incroyable 84 Garnier had been on the medical faculty at the University of Paris before named a royal physician in the colonies,

first in Martinique, and then later in Guadeloupe. FR ANOM COL E 198, Secrétariat d'État à la Marine - Personnel

colonial ancien, Lettre G. Guy André Garnier, médecin du Roi à la Martinique et à la Guadeloupe (1750/1775). 85 Ruffy called him « un des riches commercants de ce pays » in his Mémoire, FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, p.

23/Image 119. Some research reveals that this man might be François Souchay, a merchant and slave captain in

Martinique, who appears in two legal complaints in the 1750s: FR ANOM COL C8A 59 F° 56, Au sujet de l'attribution des

droits de 1 % et ½ % sur la cargaison des négriers la Liberté, de Bordeaux, capitaine Castaing, et la Sainte-Barbe, de


27

Ruffy to mount this public defense. Souchay had claimed that Ruffy “dishonored” Mlle. Barbe Prévost, a

teenage orphan living in Souchay’s household, by the “characterization of her disease… [as] on the road

to leprosy.”86 Ruffy may have felt confident at the start of his presentation, but it quickly became

supremely embarrassing. He had come to share these stories as buttress to his scholarly work, a way to

convince his audience that his newfound “perfect knowledge” regarding leprosy and his theory of

acheminement, was sound. All seemed to go well up to the point that Ruffy began to discuss

“foundations” of his belief that “the mademoiselle Barbre Prévost was achemiment a la lepre.” He

introduced the names of eight modern authors who he knew his audience would “without doubt”

recognize—yet at least one of them, Giovanni da Vigo (1450-1525, known in France as Jean de Vigo),

had written one of the most notable early treatises on syphilis, or the mal français. This was the moment

that his audience erupted in “disgust and impatience.” The royal notaries on the island, reviewing this

case, confirmed twice in marginal notes that Ruffy’s audience had expressed “such disgust and

impatience” with his explanations, “until their vexation finally made them interrupt sieur Ruffy, saying

that the speech was too long, worthless, and of no interest.” 87 With such a dispiriting response, he

departed, his umbrella soon after sailing out the window. Ruffy responded to these insults by filing a

Nantes, capitaine Souchay, arrivés aux Iles les 11 et 12 mai 1750. Placet remis à l'intendant des Iles par Louis Philippe

Lonvilliers de Poincy, lieutenant de roi à Saint-Pierre (1750) ; FR ANOM COL E 148. Dugaudin, Gratian, habitant de la

Martinique, en procès avec Souchay François négociant au Bourg Saint-Pierre (1751). 86 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 1/Image 109. Je suis assigné devant vous à la requête de M.

Souchay pour dire les raison que j’ay eu de caractériser la maladie que j’ay traittée à mademoiselle Barbe Prévost

d’acheminement à la ladrerie dont M. Souchay son parent prétend être deshonnoré… 87 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy, Mémoire, p. 3/Image 109 ; p. 4/Image 110. [MARGIN : Mémoire

d’observation, qui fût lû avec Messieurs étant assemblez chez le sieur médecin (ou il se trouva plusieurs autre personnes)

afin que leur rapport fût fait avec toutes les connaissances que le cas exigeoit. Ils en écoutèrent la lecture avec tant de

dégoût et d’impatience, qu’enfin le dépit les porta à interrompre le sieur Ruffy, disant que ce discours étoit trop long,

inutile, et indifférent….]

Il s’agit donc d’établir si c’est avec fondement que j’ay dit que la maladie de Melle Barbe Prévost étoit un

acheminement à la ladrerie pour cela il faut examiner si les simptômes qu’elle avoit out été admit par les autheurs comme

signes de cette maladie. // Il feray attention à ne point vous citer d’autheurs dont les ouvrages ne font guère guérir venus

dans ce pays mais vous devez voir sans doutte ceux d’Ambroise Paré, de Jean Devigo, Jean Fernel, Lommieux, Fabrice

d’Aquapendente, Pierre Pigray, Lazare Rivière et celuy qui est plus connu et qui est entre les mains de tous les

chirurgiens c’est la pathologie de chirurgie de Verduc. [MARGIN: Dans cet endroit le sieur Ruffy fût interrompû et

brusqué par ces messieurs, qui avoient fait de leur mieux pour ne pas l’écouter, et ne voulûrent ou tout plus l’entendre,

disant que c’étoit une lecture inutile et indifférente à la question : quelqu’instance que fit le sieur Ruffy pour les porter à

les laisser finir, il ne pût jamais l’obtenir et fût contraint de se retirer]


28

lawsuit for slander against Souchay, increasing the number of his detailed reasons (and scholarly

citations) to prove his diagnosis. This lawsuit also insinuated that many of the crown-appointed medical

professionals had conspired against him, and he directly attacked Garnier throughout, relentlessly

questioning the royal physician’s familiarity with current medical texts and proper diagnostics (he even

made several charts).88

Several times Ruffy proposed sending the disputed facts to the Royal Academy of Sciences in

Paris for their judgment, but I have yet to find any trace of that suggestion made real. In Martinique,

Ruffy lost his lawsuit, and was charged with paying all court fees for the case. The royal prosecutor

(procureur du roi) ordered on the government’s behalf that Ruffy should be “ruled by [Garnier],” and

cease in his references to this “malady… by its nature leading [acheminement] to leprosy, [as] employed

by sieur Ruffy.” But Ruffy was silenced in an even more extraordinary way when it came to the

demoiselle Barbe Prévost. He had already suffered the indignity of being shouted down, and now, his

written words were to be removed from the record, or as the judgment phrased it, they “should be excised

from the said account, and crossed out by the court clerk.”89 This order wasn’t complete, of course,

because the copy of the case still survives, perhaps due to Ruffy’s persistence in appealing to other

patrons in the government and in France. His patron in Paris, the royal surgeon M. Morand, had

apparently counselled Ruffy to have “patience, to allow this sort of unrest to fall away little by little.”90

88 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Joseph François Ruffy, maitre chirurgien étably au bourg Saint Pierre, demandeur

originaire… Contre Le sieur François Souchay commaissaire des gendarmes, négociant audit bourg Saint Pierre. (hereafter

Ruffy v. Souchay), pp. 18-21/Images 132-34. 89 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Ruffy v. Souchay, pp. 40-41/Image 144. nous ordonnons que les termes pour une

maladie dont la cure est des plus admirables étant par sa nature un acheminement à la ladrerie employé par le sieur Ruffy

en son compte signiffié le 16 octobre pour qualifier la maladie dont il a traitté la demoiselle Barbe Prévost seront

suprimez dudit compte et rayez à l’audiance, par le greffier ce fait que ledit compte sera réglé par le sieur médecin du Roy

et deux anciens chirurgiens en la manière ordinaire condamnons ledit sieur Ruffy aux dépends, si mandons fait et donné

par nous conseillers du roy juge royal juré au Fort Saint Pierre de l’isle Martinique le 24 octobre 1742 signé sur le

registre… 90 The bundle of documents surrounding this case was led with a letter dated a year after the above judgment,

complaining about Garnier’s continued mistreatment (he had allegedly threatened Ruffy with physical blows at a fine

dinner several months earlier). Ruffy hoped that something would be done to counter the “malice” of his enemies who

continued to “poison my dealings, even the healthiest [ones].” FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Images 105-107, Letter

from M. de Ruffy fils to Monseigneur [the Governor, Marquis de Champigny?], 25 Oct 1743. En vain seray je juste, exact,

je seray toujours punisable si mes ennemis ont le droit et la malice d’empoisonner mes actions les plus saines. Nous nous


29

Was Ruffy’s mistake not having lived long enough in Martinique to be sensitive to the deeper

anxieties in the island milieu? This is likely part of the issue. In the case of those who rejected Ruffy’s

ideas, both of the royal surgeons in Garnier’s camp had been present in Martinique during the explosive

1728 controversy between Peyssonnel and Bordegaraye.91 The physicians’ remarks on the lingering

ailments of Barbe Prévost read like a comedy of early modern medical discomfort with the female body:

she had fallen victim to “an hysterical malady… caused by a menstrual suppression”; her lingering

ailment was a “cachexic state… caused by fright”; or as Ruffy had claimed, she suffered from “a

universal herpes tending to leprosy.”92 Yet I would argue that the root of Ruffy’s conflict with his

colleagues and M. Souchay over the “dishonor” of a pre-leprosy diagnosis (and by extension, his own

reputation) was mostly about the persistent popular belief that leprosy was an African disease, that it was

spread by interracial sex, and that a young, unmarried Frenchwoman would be irreversibly sullied if it

became public knowledge that her ailment was even tangentially related to leprosy—hence the outsized

tromperions eux et moy, eux de croire que la distance qu’il y a d’icy à Paris vous empechera de connoitre leurs

injustice… il y après de trois que feu M. Morand, à qui j’en avois écrit, m’avoit porté à prendre patience, et à laisser

tomber peu à peu ces sortes de fermentation, ce sont les termes d’une de ses lettres, il me mande, qu’il avoit eü l’honneur

de vous parler, et que vous luy aviez parût fort disposé à me rendre service dans l’occasion. The Governor made a vague

and brief mention of the Ruffy affair in a formal report of 1744 to the Colonial Ministry, FR ANOM COL C8A 56 F° 21,

Correspondance à l'arrivée en provenance de la Martinique. Jacques Charles Bochart de Noroy, marquis de Champigny,

gouverneur général des îles du Vent [à le secrétaire d'État à la Marine], 1744. It is possible that Ruffy was also the

“Chirurgien de St. Pierre” mentioned in a long report from 1749 by the next Governor General of the Windward Islands

when he summarized the current “fight against leprosy in Guadeloupe and Marie-Galant .” That surgeon reportedly had

taken in “quelquesuns de ces Lepreux pour voir s’il ne seroit pas possibe de les gueris.” FR ANOM COL C8A 58 F° 329.

« Sommaire des maximes et des vues du marquis de Caylus dans l’administration des Isles francoises du Vent de

l’Amériqueet des lettres qu’il a ecrit en conséquence. » (1749), f. 329. 91 Michel Jouneaux was first established in 1713 in Fort Saint Pierre, and even provided a witness statement in the

dispute in favor of Bordegaraye. By 1737 Jouneaux had become the surgeon major of the troops garrisoned in Martinique,

and was set to treat prisoners in the royal prisons in Saint Pierre. FR ANOM COL E 232, Secrétariat d'État à la Marine -

Personnel colonial ancien, Lettres H à K. Though less specifics are known, Jacques Lartigue served nearly 40 years as a

surgeon in Martinique prior to his death in 1769. See FR ANOM COL E 258, Secrétariat d'État à la Marine - Personnel

colonial ancien, Lettre L. Jacques Lartigue, inspecteur général de la chirurgie à la Martinique (1767/1769) ; and FR

ANOM COL C8A 59 F° 265, Correspondance de Maximin de Bompar, gouverneur général des îles du Vent, et Charles

Marin Hurson, intendant des îles du Vent, 1752. Ils demandent un brevet de chirurgien-major de la Martinique pour le

sieur Lartigue qui exerce depuis 27 ans à la satisfaction générale. 92 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, Images 124-125. Copie du Rapport Pour qu’a donné le Sr. Perrochon de l’Etat de

la Dem.ll Prévost, le 3 9bre. 1742 (hereafter Perrochon, Rapport). …une maladie istérique, vulgairement appellée jaunisse

ou palles couleurs, par une suppression menstruelle ; Ibid., Images 125-26. Copie du rapport qui a été fait de l’état de la

demoiselle Prévost, par les sieurs Garnier, médecin, Jouneaux et Lartigue, chirurgiens La malade est tombée dans cet étant

cachétique depuis quelques années, à l’occasion d’une peur qu’elle eut lors de ses règles qui furent tout à coup

supprimées et qui ne sont par revenues depuis ; Ibid., Ruffy v. Souchay, p. 9, Image 128. Dans ce compte la maladie de la

demoiselle Prévost fut caractérisée de herpe universelle tendante à la lèpre…


30

response to Ruffy’s theory of acheminement. Unlike others on the island, who would have been aware of

these lingering subtexts, Ruffy seems to have been impervious—or at least so single-mindedly focused on

developing his theories and his heroic cures that he did not think it was necessary to be quite so sensitive.

Yet he fit in with colonial society enough to neglect any mention of compassion or emotional attachment

to the African-descended patients he also treated. These stories serve only as references to well-known

cases, ways to bolster his expertise or prove his correctness in disputed diagnoses.

Hatred, Circumspection, and the Passions

Like Ruffy, Peyssonnel spent many years after his official survey of suspected leprosy sufferers

feeling unjustly cut off from his “emotional community” of the republic of letters in France. That break

would frustrate his desire to gain a reputation in metropolitan scientific circles as well as his social status

on the island of Guadeloupe, where he continued to live for the next 32 years.94 He might have well

cursed Bordegaraye, the author of his fall from grace, who had died within the year following their

dispute.95 Peyssonnel couldn’t even attempt to clear his name with a lawsuit as Ruffy had tried to do, nor

does he seem to have tried to get support from the Académie des sciences. But Peyssonnel seemed to

have also (partly at least) blamed himself: “Ordinarily the earth hides our [defects?], but here time

uncovers them and makes them manifest.” He admitted that he had lived “many years in a cruel

perplexity.” On the one hand, he was convinced that he could count himself among those “honest and

disinterested men, sensible of the public good,” and so had to make difficult decisions about such matters,

but “at the same time” he felt himself “touched by the misfortune” of fellow islanders who feared the

spots that would presage the dreaded leprosy, whether on their own body or those they loved.

94 For more on his life in Guadeloupe and his frustrated scientific career, see Kristen Block, « Jean-André Peyssonnel:

un homme des Lumières, famille et esclavage dans la Guadeloupe du XVIIIe siècle », trans. Joanna Merkel. Bulletin de la

Société d'Histoire de la Guadeloupe. Forthcoming, n° 183 (mai - août 2019). 95 FR ANOM COL C8A40, f. 20. M. de Champigny et d’Orgeville, Appointements du médecin Bordegaraye qui vient

de mourir ainsi que le médecin Carrel, on demande deux médecins pour les remplacer, 17 jan 1729.


31

These were the somber words he shared privately in 1748 with Mr. Dumonville, a new royal

physician lately come to Guadeloupe.96 Both men had been ordered on this twentieth anniversary of La

Désirade’s founding as a leper colony to undertake a second report on the fate of the sufferers there.

Peyssonnel warned his colleague of the likelihood of social ostracization: “It will be difficult to preserve

ourselves from the hatred of whole families, whose relatives we [will] have declared infected by this

malady—I felt several times this unjust hatred, and have been burdened with blows that I could not ward

off.97 Peyssonnel also shared news of the continued local distrust of his medical opinions, especially

Bordegaraye’s long-lived “land scurvy,” as well as the popular assertion “that the leprosy of the ancients

is nothing more than the pox of our times and that the patients who appear have nothing but a poorly-

treated, inveterate pox.”98 As we have seen, French colonists battled hardily against any hint that they

might be “tainted” by the word leprosy, and thus Peyssonnel recommended that his colleague not use the

term in questionable cases, which could “give the officials the means by which to act with their regular

prudence, and by which to render their judgment.99

Given Peyssonnel’s many years of residence on the island, he also had made some significant

adjustments in his sensibility regarding slavery. The dissertation he had written following the first visit

96 FR ANOM C7A15 F° 148. Nomination de Mr Dumonville comme médecin du Roi à la Guadeloupe, 9 janvier 1746 ;

FR ANOM C7A15 F° 152. Dumonville, Son installation en Guadeloupe. Demande à recevoir les émoluments qui lui sont

dus, son brevet et l’autorisation de siéger au Conseil supérieur (20 juillet 1746). 97 The only reason we have Peyssonnel’s letter and personal statement on the 1748 visit is because he sent them to

London’s Royal Society, where he hoped to publish some of his scientific observations after being shut out of

opportunities in France. I must thank Fiona Keates, Joanna McManus and the staff at the Royal Society Archives

(hereafter RSA) for digital copies of these manuscripts. RSA, L&P.III.214 – Read 3 Feb 1757. ‘A visitation of leprosy at

Guadeloupe.’ The Royal Society also holds a translation of this piece: Trans. Abstract by W Watson (Phil Trans 50

p.38)—36pp French. 35 pp Eng.

Peysonnel, letter to M Dumonville, 10 Aug, 1748, pp. 8-9. Que d’ordinairement que la terre cache nos [ ??], icy le

tems les decouvre et les manifeste, et ce tems est tres long, l’on reste plusieurs annees dans une perplexité cruelle…. les

personnes d’authorité, les honete gens desinteressés sensibles au bien public, et en meme tems touches du malheur des

particulier attendent avec un silence plein de crainte, et d’esperance, la decision qui entraine le sort de ceux qui sont

soubsonnes. 98 RSA, L&P.III.214, Peyssonnel to Dumonville, p. 12. Les autres sur l’avis en sentiment de feu M de Bordegaraye,

qui etoit medecin a la martinique lorsque jy arrivay, disent que cest un scorbut de terre, nom, qui luy avoit plu d’inventer,

et donner a cette maladie. Les autres soutiennent que la lepre des anciens na jamais été que la verole de nos jours et que

les malades qui paroissent n’ont qu’une verole inveterée maltraitee. 99 RSA, L&P.III.214, « Proces verbal et resultat de la seconde visite des lépreux faite a la Guadaloupe en 1748 »

(hereafter Peyssonnel, Pròces-verbal 1748), pp. 10-11.


32

demonstrated his lack of in-depth knowledge of the origins of the disease in West Africa, seeing it only as

a widespread problem: “we have found leprous negroes from all countries, some senegalese, others [from]

congo, Loango, [Ouidah], Mina and other nations… [as well as] among the creole negroes… born in the

islands.” 100 By the time of his second visit Peyssonnel thought he had discovered a narrower conclusion

that might help the colonial government avoid the introduction of affected African captives, writing “we

have observed that the Arada and Hybaux [Igbo] negroes are more subject to it than the other black

nations.”101 Dumonville seems to have given freer rein to his inquisitiveness, and so chose to interview

“two reasonable Negros… infected with this evil” who he believed could be trusted not to “alter the truth

of the facts that we will report.”102 He named only one of these informants, Jacob, in his essay, while

noting that the other “called this malady Opo,” and “trembled in horror while telling his story” of how

unhappy sufferers like him had been forced to live in the forest, relying on frightened villagers to leave

food for them by the side of the road.103

Yet far from identifying with the emotions of his informants, Dumonville found that his own

identity made it much easier to join with the “emotional community” of his compatriots, and to blame

African-descended people for the spread of leprosy to whites. Peyssonnel had already warned against

allowing any enslaved people presumed to be leprous from returning to Guadeloupe, providing as an

100 Archives nationales de France (hereafter ANFr), Paris, Marine G//102, no. 102. Traité de la Lepre à la

Guadeloupe. Par M. Peyssonel (hereafter Peyssonel, Traité de la Lepre). 25 May 1728. 132 pp., quote pp. 38-39. nous

navons pu reconnoistre qui cette maladie fut particuliere a aucune nation de la guinée parce que nous avons trouve des

negres ladres de tout payis les uns senegalois les autre congo, Loango, juda, mine et autres nations et quelles [est] de

meme nature chez les negre creoles ou nes dans les isles. 101 RSA, L&P.III.214, Peyssonnel, Pròces-verbal 1748, p. 2. 102 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay de Dissertation sur une Maladie observée dans quelques Îles de

Vent de l’Amerique en 1748. ~80 ff, no pagination. One was “of the Hueda nation, and the other Congo,” l’un étant de

nation foëda [Hueda ?] et l’autre Congo … [ces] deux négres raisonnables, qui, étant infectés de ce mal, n’ont pu s’y

tromper et n’ont eû d’ailleur aucun intérêt de nous en imposer, en alterant la vérité des faits que nous allons rapporter

d’apres eux. 103 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay. dans son païs il y avoit grand nombre de Négres infectés de

même qui avoient les oreilles très grosses, la face couverte de tubercules d’un gros volume ; que leurs mains tomboient en

mortification avec perte et chûte de tous leur doigts, de façon qu’ils etoient obligés de prendre avec leur [moignons] les

vases, dont ils se servent ordinairement pour boire ; que ces malheureux restoient séquestrés dans les forêts ; que lors

qu’on leurs portoit des vivres, on les laissoit sur le bord des chemins, en se retirant au plus vîte ; qu’on les fuioit avec

soin, évitant surtout leur rencontre ; que les enfants de ces malades, de même que ceux qui communiquent ou habitent

avec eux tombent dans le même mal qui se nomme Opo. Ce négre frémissoit d’horreur en faisant [img2-6] son réçit …


33

example “the negresse Babette of Sr. Ledrie, condemned as # 249 of the first visit, and as #220 of those

sent to Desirade.” After she “returned to the home of her master…. two more negroes at that household

have been infected, and two children of hers declared suspect.”104 He recommended that colonists practice

caution with enslaved wet-nurses lest their children become tainted.105 Dumonville, on the other hand,

focused on the touchy subject of libertinage, especially the “unbridled lustfulness that reigns so generally”

in all parts of Africa, and which allowed it to spread from its origins along the Nile across the whole

continent, and then to the Americas. He took care to specify that “White [men]” were largely innocent of

the spread of leprosy, having “no knowledge” of what the warning spots on enslaved women’s skin might

portend. He nonetheless recommended that white men should be “less merciless in the pursuit of

Negresses” since it was now known “how formidable and contagious they are.” He followed with a

memory that made him “shudder” with disgust: “a European (let’s not mince words—a Satyr), whose

passion, full of fury and lechery, was not held in check,” and thus who continued to pursue sex with one

enslaved women, even after she “had lost all her fingers.” Dumonville’s disgust was clear in how he

summarized the story, calling the residents of “Désirade, the center of all the horrors of Leprosy, brought

together and concentrated.”106

104 RSA, L&P.III.214, Peyssonnel, Pròces-verbal 1748, p. 12. après l’expulsion de ces malades on leur permit, on en

en tolere le retour, comme il est arrivé après la visite de 1728, car nous avons observé que la negresse Babet du Sr Ledrie,

condamnée au numero 249 de la premiere visite, et au n. 220 de celle cy envoyée a la desirade, d’où elles est revenue ches

son maitre, et a infecté ches luy deux de ses negres, et que deux enfants de leur negresse sont declarés suspects, ainsi que

beaucoup d’autres, 105 RSA, L&P.III.214, Peyssonnel, Pròces-verbal 1748, pp. 8-9. il paroit au moins probable que le commerce avec les

negresses infecteés, contribue beaucoup a reprendre cette maladie, et nous ajouterons que les nourisses, ou les negresses

qui alaitent, et soignent les enfants, si elles sont infectees contribuent encore plus a communiquer cette maladie, dans les

familles d’ailleurs exemptes de tout soubson, c’est une grande attention que les habittants doivent avoir dans le cas ou il

faut qu’ils prenent des negresse pour alaiter, et soigner leurs enfants 106 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay, [img2-8] … les Blancs qui n’avoient aucune connoissance de

leur nature [des taches], ni aucun soupçon de leurs suittes. A présent qu’on n’ignore plus combien elles son redoutables et

contagieuses, en est on livré avec moins d’acharnement, à la porsuitte des Négresses ? nous connoissons, ce qu’on ne peut

rapporter sasn frémir, un Européen, tranchons le terme, un Satyre, dont la passion, pleine de fureur et de lubriçité, n’a

point été tenüe en bride, par l’état déplorable d’une esclave noire, qui, depuis vingt ans, avoit perdu tous les doigts des

mains, et le dirons nous ? c’est à la Désirade, au milieu de toutes les horreurs de la Lépre, réunïes et concentrées, que ce

prodige a été observé.


34

In the end, Dumonville proved a much more supportive colleague to Peyssonnel, confirming to

his superiors that the first-arrived royal physician had done his job well, and his judgment could be

trusted in terms of distinguishing between leprosy, syphilis, and Bordegaraye’s inventive “land

scurvy.”107 Peyssonnel emphasized that if the government wished to “extirpate this public cancer (if we

may use the expression)… to tear out all its roots,” none could return from their exile on La Désirade.108

Dumonville, on the other hand, held out hope that some experimentation could provide a cure, for he

claimed he could not “rest in inaction, in view of such a pressing calamity… God forbid!” He

recommended initiating “new tests” [epreuves Nouvelles] on leprosy sufferers, from mercury to sudorific

woods like guïac, sarsaparilla, and quinine, perhaps even more exotic purgatives like snake venom.109 He

even dared to mention one “assured specific against Leprosy” from the times of ancient Egypt.

It is human blood, which one reads with horror. For besides the barbarous cruelty that would be

necessary, one presumes it can’t legitimately be useful—the volatile spirits are dissipated after the

effusion of blood and this mass coagulates immediately. We do not see, moreover, that human

blood could be more energetic in this sense than that of other animals. One could, however, try

this latter option if judged appropriate.110

107 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay, [img1-3] … Nous devons encore avertir que M.r de

Peyssonnel, ayant donné en 1728 une histoire de cette maladie, cest à dire une description exacte, nette et préçise de

l’ordre et de la liaison de ses effets, et de tous les accidents observés… 108 RSA, L&P.III.214, Peyssonnel, Pròces-verbal 1748, p. 12. Nous prendrons la liberté de faire observer que si l’in

se porte a l’extirpation de ce cancer public, si nous osons employer cette expression, l’operation sera de nul effet, si on

n’en arrache apres toutes les dernieres racines, et les bougeons a mesure qu’ils pullulleront…. c’est ce qui nous fait

estimer, que si on retranche ces malades de la societe, on doit de tems en tems renouveller la vinte, et tenir la main a leur

reele exclusion, sans en avoir, sans en aucune manière, et sous aucun pretexte permetre ou tollerer leur retour. 109 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay, [img3-19 to 3-24]. Quoi donc! Resterons nous dans l’inaction,

à la vuë d’une calamité si pressante, et ne serons nous que d’oisifs spectateurs de ses ravages horribles ? à Dieu ne

plaise !... [3-19] … il y auroit de la barbarie à ne pas tenter toutes sortes de voïes et d’épreuves nouvelles, a fin d’étouffer

le mal… 110 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay, [img 4-22]. On ne doit point être surpris, si nous ne faisont

dans cet assai, aucune mention d’un prétendu rémede, autrefois fameux, et qui passe encore dans l’esprit de bien des

Gens, pour être un spécificque assuré contre la Lépre. C’est la sang humain dont ou lit dans horreurs, que les Ptolomés

ou Rois d’Egipte, se sent autrefois servis, pour se guérir de cette terrible maladie. Car outre la cruauté barbare qu’il y

auroint à faire usage de ce moien, il est à présumer q’on ne peut legitiment en espérer d’untilité ; les esprits volatils se

dissipants après l’effusion du sang et cette masse se coagulant aussitôt ; nous ne voïons pas, d’ailleurs, ce que la sange

humain pourroit avoir de plus ínergique en ce genre que celui des autres animaux ; on peut [4-23] cependant essayer ce

dernier si on le juge à propos.


35

In a time and place where stories circulated about African maroons barbarously capturing and eating

French settlers’ children,111 one can be certain the seasoned officials in Guadeloupe read this passage and

judged that Dumonville’s sensibility had not been sufficiently attuned to life in the Caribbean. Even the

learned men at the Universities of Paris and Montpellier, who Dumonville hoped would receive copies of

his treatise, were unlikely to approve such a bloody experiment.112

As a result of the colonial experience, prejudice and disgust became engrained in French bodies.

Naturalists and medical professionals learned to develop their own heightened awareness of the

unintentional consequences of their dispassionate “scientific” discourse regarding leprosy, becoming

attuned to the developing “moral economy” of French Antillean society. Likewise, colonial practices and

emotional communications trained visitors to suppress emotions like pity towards the suffering of

African-descended people with whom they shared space, and to become desensitized to their pain—even

when such daily communication might have just as easily built bonds of sympathy. Instead, French

habitants daily practiced their own embodied colonial sensibilities by unconsciously transferring their

own negative habits, stunted emotions, and intellectual limitations onto racial (and sometimes classed)

Others.

Scholars have come to recognize how French physicians and philosophers understood this new

concept of sensibility as a core attribute that helped humans build their moral fibers, allowing people to

develop a physical sense of “sympathy [that] enables the individual to recognize himself by knowing his

111 FR ANOM C7A13 F° 161 / 4 février 1738. Chasse aux nègres marrons, crimes commis par ces derniers : reported

"un muetre d'un Enfant blanc quils ont sacrifiés a leur faux Dieux pour leurs Estre favorable, qu' Ensuite ils ont mangé) et

de la puission qu'en en à fait….FR ANOM C7A13 F° 196 / 1738 / Analyse d’une lettre de Marin, ordonnateur qui rend

compte du procès jugé au Conseil Supérieur contre des nègres marrons accués d’avoir enlevé et mangé un enfant. →

reported that la pluspars de des Coupables etoient des Negres Mondongues qui'eloint reputés antropophages… 112 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay, [img 4-23]. … nous sont ardenement désirer qu’on envoye

dans les célèbres facultés de Médecine, de Paris et de Montpellier, des copies de cet essai de dissertation ; quel

qu’informe et plein de deffauts qu’il soit, il donnera lieur aux habiles Médecins [4-24] de ces deux villes d’exerçer leurs

talents et leur sagaçite, sur cette matiére, qui mérite d’être traite avec plus d’étenduë et de profondeur, et par des hommes

d’une sçience et d’une pratique connoisance dans l’art de guérir.


36

own likeness in other men.”113 By the mid-eighteenth century, it was also a truism that the rise of

American colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade had altered French concepts of sensibility, although

philosophes seemed to be torn about how to respond. Thinkers like Raynal wrote eloquently about the

benefits of commerce, but also observed that trade deadened sentimental feeling, particularly when it

came to the slave trade. His corporeal metaphors about the problems and promise of global trade

equivocated: slavery couldn’t be ended abruptly—one organ could not be cut out without harming the

integrity of the whole.114

We find that in these cases, that innovative eighteenth-century medical theories about sensibility

represented what we might today term biological determinist principles. Eighteenth-century French

thinkers believed that one’s own bodily fibers and nerves were the essence of what makes people attuned

to the world. But by denying the social privilege and power structures of the world around them, science-

minded observers looked to the mechanisms of sensibility rather than the ways that embodied emotions

were daily conditioned by class and context.115 In his report on leprosy in 1748, Dumonville expressed

what would become a very common sentiment among Europeans, that Africans’ exaggerated

sensibilities—their “violent passions… Grief, Sadness, Despair, Jealousy, and Love”—were perhaps the

cause of their bodily ills, not the social context of their enslavement. “Love makes them do unbelievable

things,” he exclaimed, everything from violent acts of jealousy and self-harm to their frequent “nocturnal

pursuits” to lovers on other plantations to “answer their brutal passions.” These emotional habits of body,

113 Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2006), 37. 114 Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 206-07, 216-17. 115 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, Essay, [img 2-10] La Lépre reconnoît icy des causes primitives

internes; à quelle soule de passions violents les négres ne font-ils pas en proïe? Outre celles que nous êprovons, ils

semblent être plus fortement dominés par le Chagrin, la Tristesse, le Déséspoïr, la Jalousie et par l’amour qui les tient

servilement enchaînes sou son jouy…. l'Amour leur fait faire des choses incroïables: à quelles [2-11] courses nocturnes ?

à quelles fatigues ? malgré les pénibles travaux d’une journée, commencée longtems avant de lever du soleil, s’exposent

plusieurs, pour aller assouvir leur brutale passion, dans des quartiers fort eloignés de leur demeure ? l’excés de leurs

passions… épuisent les esprits, et font tomber le sang et la Lymphe dans un épaississement extrême ; n’estu pas avoüer

d’un cri général qu’elles font par conséquent aussi une des causes primitives de la Lépre.

ADD TO CONCLUSION? Fears of over-active sensibility, as represented in the eighteenth and nineteenth century,

were also essentialized in the hypochondrias of women and the melancholia of studious men. CITATIONS—CAN I

CONNECT TO RUFFY’S IDEA OF hypochondriacal affectations leading to leprosy?


37

he believed, would “exhaust the spirits, and makes the Blood and the Lymph [deteriorate] into extreme

thickness,” which he connected (unsurprisingly) to “the primitive causes of Leprosy.”

Leprosy as a diagnosis affected many more than just those who suffered its effects or were feared

and stigmatized. As I have shown in this article, the emotions surrounding leprosy extend beyond

individuals (whether sufferers, medical professionals or their families) to governmental institutions and

the archive itself. In fact, these various reports, as interesting as they are in terms of dialogue on

eighteenth century medicine and colonial morality, would not exist were it not for authorities’ desire both

to protect the island’s profitability (which relied on the expansion of slave labor), and to shield important

members of the body politic from a shameful association with an incurable contagion.