Modern Architectures of North America

Medical climate

The limited number of entrances to the residential quarters reflects the extent to which paternalism held sway in clinical practice. Clinicians’ tendency to seize the moral high ground in determining treatment and health-related activities is well-documented, but the leprosarium was unique in that its doctors were vested with the authority to control the scope of patients’ physical and social environments (Miller 151-52). Medicine is thus a totalizing force, coloring patients’ worlds with notion that leprosy was wholly constitutive of their existence.

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