A Study Of Leprosy Treatment In Jiangnan During The Anti-Japanese War

Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease with a history of more than 2,000 years in China,and its distribution is most prevalent in Fujian,Guangdong and Jiangnan.After the Opium War,the Anglican Church founded the Hangzhou Guangji Leprosy Hospital in Hangzhou,which focused on both physical and spiritual healing,starting the "church leprosarium model".In the 1920 s,with the rise of the "non-fundamental" movement,Chinese elites in Shanghai,driven by nationalist ideology,founded the first national leprosy relief organization,the Chinese Leprosy Relief Society,which created another model of "treating the body more than the spirit".Leprosy treatment model.The leprosy control in the Jiangnan area entered a situation where two models coexisted.During the local war,the Shanghai Hongkou Leprosy Hospital was forced to shut down due to the "January 28 Incident" and the work of the Chinese Leprosy Relief Society was halted for several months.On the one hand,Hangzhou Guangji Leprosy Hospital and China Leprosy Sanatorium continued to develop,and on the other hand,Jiangsu Rugao Leprosy Clinic and Nanchang Leprosy Hospital were founded,making the prevention and treatment of leprosy in Jiangnan,both at the level of "healing the body and the spirit",developed to a certain extent.At the beginning of the war,the Japanese invasion of Jiangnan intensified,and as Shanghai,Jiangsu,Zhejiang and Jiangxi fell one after another,the Chinese leprosarium model was greatly damaged,and the Chinese leprosarium was forced to move to an "isolated island" and struggled to survive;the Rugao leprosarium was forced to shut down.At the same time,the church leprosarium model made use of the "treaty privilege" to struggle to survive and even achieve a certain degree of abnormal development.After the outbreak of the Pacific War,the Japanese imposed strict control on the leprosy control institutions in Jiangnan.The work of the church leprosarium,which had lost the protection of treaty privileges,basically came to a halt;the Chinese Leprosy Sanatorium under Wang’s rule was forced to help itself and struggled to maintain itself.After the outbreak of the war,the Sino-Japanese ethnic conflict became the main conflict in Chinese society,and the target of the "nationalism" advocated by the Chinese elite changed from the British and American missionaries to the Japanese.The conflict between "humanitarianism" and "nationalism" in the cause of leprosy treatment in Jiangnan gradually faded.In the face of the national crisis,they did not have time to compete with the medical missionaries for the dominant role in the treatment of leprosy,but chose to cooperate with them to safeguard the lives of leprosy patients and to maintain the cause of leprosy treatment in Jiangnan.The Japanese had a negative impact on leprosy in the Hongkou area of Shanghai during the "January 28 Incident";they destroyed leprosy treatment in Jiangnan after the "July7 Incident";and after the "Pearl Harbor Incident" The hypocrisy of leprosy relief is fully demonstrated by the fact that the Wang government only transferred leprosy patients but did not allocate the promised funds.