4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST of an epidemic, call for re-thinking. The study of leprosy in colonial India also offers fresh insights into the complex process of formation of colonial health policies; there were great similarities in western and Indian perceptions of leprosy, and a common traditions of discrimination; and in the absence of a determined and united opposition from indigenous sections, the stock excuse of the colonial official, that beneficial and enlightening medical efforts were hampered by ignorance and superstition of the natives, was untenable. The Emergence of the Leprosy Asylum In India the earliest asylums for leprosy patients date from the eighteenth century; the Cochin Lazarus Hospital at Pallypuram was built by the Dutch in 1728. The numbers of asylums increased during the nineteenth century, but the process was slow, uneven, and dependent on individual initiative in the absence of an overall government policy. Besides asylums, there were other institutions for the care of leprosy patients. Some hospitals had leprosy wards; in the Bombay Presidency leprosy patients were not prohibited from using local hospitals but this was not encouraged; patients flocked to the native Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy general hospital, which became one of the major centers in the region for medical treatment of leprosy, and leprosy patients soon overran the wards for incurables. In the Madras Presidency hospitals did not encourage leprosy patients, or they tended to admit them only when they sought treatment for a concurrent ailment. At Puri, a pilgrimage center where leprosy patients were known to congregate in search of miracle cures and alms, patients were admitted to the pilgrim hospital, where they received food and medicines at government expense, but it was considered "injudicious" to admit them into the wards, so they were kept in verandas.11 Poor houses or dharamsalas sometimes admitted leprosy patients, where they lived with other disabled persons, sometimes in a separate building.12 By the end of the century, the leprosy asylum was recognized as the institution for leprosy by both the medical fraternity and the state; the Leprosy Commission for India (1889) turned to asylums for information on medical treatments for leprosy, and also to conduct their own researches; the situation was similar in 1916 when the Government of India communicated to all asylums regarding trials of the new treatment that excited the medical fraternity the world over, the hypodermic use of chaulmoogra oil.13 The colonial state in India accorded official recognition to the leprosy asylum with the Lepers' Act of 1898, as the site for medical treatment and confinement.14 The asylum achieved this status as a result of several factors. A central role in founding leprosy asylums was played by the church and