“They are not human”

“You’re certainly outstanding as a man of letters, and you have a brilliant hand for writing, but as a person you’re nothing.” ² Fujimoto Toshi (1901–1987), an inmate at Tokyo’s Zensei Hospital, heard this spoken by a doctor to fellow Hansen’s disease patient Hōjō Tamio (1914–1937) in 1934. ³ The attitude was not unusual. Many people believed that patients were in the hospital for the good of the nation, to prevent the spread of the illness, and to benefit from palliative care. For many medical professionals, the hospitals were a humane way to treat patients, providing them with a haven from social stigma. At the same time, a number of doctors viewed their patients as having little human value, without a claim to any agency with which to relate their own experience.