Sex(ually Transmitted Diseases) and the City: Syphilis Control in Tokyo, 1868–1912, by Susan L. Burns

Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022, 5 p.m., Neilson Browsing Room, Neilson Library

Susan L. Burns is Professor of East Asian Language and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Professor Burns has written on the history of the body as it came to be conceptualized within medical and legal discourses. Her 2019 book Kingdom of the Sick: Leprosy, Citizenship, and Japan (University of Hawaii Press) explores the long history of leprosy in Japan from the late medieval period when it was identified as a “karmic retribution disease” to the modern period when attempts to control the disease prompted the creation of a system of public sanitaria.

Burns’s lecture is in conjunction with the Kahn Institute yearlong project Health and Medicine, Culture and Society: Crossroads in a Liberal Arts Education.