Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World

A revelatory history of humanity - spanning thousands of years and ranging across the world - told through the lens of a misunderstood disease.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 19 June 2025
Publisher: Faber & Faber

The story of leprosy is the story of humanity. It is a story of isolation and exclusion, of resilience and resistance, one which has permeated global cultures in myriad ways for thousands of years, dividing the world into the 'clean' and the 'unclean'.

Oliver Basciano's journey to demystify leprosy takes him from the Romanian border, the hinterlands of Brazil and the fringes of Siberia to the Japanese archipelago, Robben Island and the northern provinces of Mozambique. It reveals the image of medieval leprosy to be a nineteenth-century myth invented to justify gross mistreatment of patients, a blueprint used for further state-sanctioned stigma: colonialism and racism, religious and economic exploitation. Basciano meets those living with leprosy today, those exiled to various leprosaria around the world and forced to find homes away from home; he hears stories of community and perseverance in the face of grave circumstances, of lives bound to each other through shared experience and a refusal to be cast aside.

A work of outstanding empathy, Outcast shines new light on the human condition, asking: does a society's sense of itself always rely on ostracisation?

Weight: 524g
Dimension: 163 x 242 x 34 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780571384303
Edition number: Main