Facing a growing epidemic in the late nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawaii initiated a controversial law that ripped apart families in the name of public health. Leprosy had afflicted Hawaiians for years, and the disease spread faster than medics could contain or understand it. Still decades away from the discovery that a simple regimen of antibiotics can cure leprosy, many societies believed that isolation was the only way to contain the disease.
So in 1866, at a high point in the epidemic, a desperate King Kamehameha V authorized the Board of Health of Hawaii to establish leper colonies on a remote peninsula of the island of Molokai. Infected persons would, under government orders, bid their families farewell and board ships to Kalawao, where they lived in squalor until the disease took their lives.
