During
almost all of the 20th century, the treatment for this disease, in Brazil, was
understood as the total confinement of the patient in leprosariums. These people
were taken from their homes and families, many of them under gunpoint by the
then so-called Sanitary Police, and locked up in small isolated communities,
usually forever.
Left: Antonio Pereira
Santos doesn't remember his own age. Coming from the backlands, he got confined
at Bonfim Leprosarium for 23 years. After the colony deactivation, he moved
to a slum in the outskirts of Bonfim.
After 1976, due to the changes in the policy for the treatment of this disease,
these colonies were partially or totally deactivated and their patients were
abandoned without any policy for social reintegration. Without any place else
to go, they stayed around these archaic structures, dying one-by-one, slow and
silently.
Right:
Emilia da Frota Neri, 70, confined in Antonio Aleixo Leprosarium at the age
of 16, holds a picture from the 50's. Her hands got totally mutilated by washing
clothes to help support her family.
