Abstract
The present paper represents an initial report of an ongoing project designed to investigate the interplay of emotional and social factors as they operate in modifying or transforming the life program of persons afflicted with a chronic illness. For theoretical reasons leprosy has been selected as the condition for focus. While leprosy has many of the characteristic effects on the patient found in other chronic conditions, from the standpoint of therapy, surgical intervention, or even physical incapacity, leprosy presents certain advantages to a social psychological investigation of chronic illness, in that social and emotional experiences and phenomena play an exceedingly important role in patient outcomes. These factors, at times, surpass the physical facts of deformity and dysfunction in modifying the career of persons with the disease. It is as a psychosocial phenomenon that leprosy is most challenging to behavioral scientists interested in the description and theory of medical sociology. The present research, however, is not being conducted purely in the interests of sociology or the psychology of non-psychiatric patients. It is aimed towards a broader framework, that of the slowly emerging field of clinical sociology or clinical anthropology.
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