The Crime of Leprosy: The Red Threat and U.S. Hansen’s Disease Policy in Cold War Korea

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how and why Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patients in South Korea emerged as a Cold War ideological battleground. Against the backdrop of U.S. wars of intervention in Asia, I argue that Cold War narratives of contagion used medical terms to conflate “infectious” ideologies and Hansen’s disease. Through reading Litany of Hope (1962), a film produced by the United States Information Service and loosely based on the life of Korean poet and former Hansen’s disease patient Han Ha-un, I analyze how U.S. Cold War ideology characterized Hansen’s disease patients in South Korea as recuperable internal enemies in need of humanitarian medical intervention.