Outcast: In Search of Leprosy, a Misunderstood Disease

Outcast is remarkable. It is a powerful, revelatory and truly shocking account spanning across time and place, then and still now, grippingly and humanely recounted.

It is impossible not to be moved by the lives unfolding in these pages, impossible not to be left transformed and enlightened. This is an ambitious, fascinating and rich journey. A cool, expansive assessment of us as humans – cruel, frightened, hasty and merciless but also resilient, creative and capable of forging remarkable community bonds.

A new kind of travel book – across continents and, more importantly, across the partitions that separate the healthy from the damned – Outcast is a revisionist history that makes you realise, when you turn its last page, how differently you look at the world than you did when you first cracked its spine.

Marvellous . . . A gravely enlightening and moving pathology of a disease that remains a byword for marginalisation, a ‘receptacle for nightmares and prejudice’, in Basciano’s words. Written with a meticulous attentiveness that never loses sight of the individual, Outcast maps epidemiology onto colonial history, allowing the voices of those who have lived with leprosy, across the oceans and the centuries, to emerge in irrepressible chorus.

Nothing is more central to our global system, and its myriad crises, than the question of exclusion — who is granted full humanity, and who is rendered invisible — and the history of leprosy is the tale of our varied approaches to the outsider. In Oliver Basciano's capable and careful hands, the leprosarium becomes a key to understanding the world that emerged in the wake of classical and feudal civilizations; the story of a disease becomes a page-turner about the nature of life itself.

Superb . . . fascinating and humane . . . a hymn to the resilience of the cast-out and the lives they have managed to make . . . Deftly balancing learned and elegant reflection on illness and prejudice with the very human faces of the disease’s sufferers, Basciano has crafted a quite brilliant book. It’s a fitting tribute to outcasts who should never have been cast out.