Leprosy Missionaries

People who have been solicited for money to support, treat and cure lepers last week received a worthwhile shock. Few have seen lepers. They have read about lepers in the Bible and medieval histories; they have heard doctors and missionaries tell of the silvery horror. But it has been easy to believe that science was curing leprosy, that money to fight the disease was not badly needed.

That is not so. A meeting of the American Mission to Lepers, at Manhattan last week, made the point very clear.

Four million lepers exist in the world. One million are in India. The U. S. has a leprosarium at Carville, La. At Culion, Philippine Islands, is another, and at Molokai, Hawaii, a third. In memory of the late General Leonard Wood, his friends are soliciting $2,000,000 for a leprosy hospital and clinic at Culion. They have a little more than half the needed money; are prodding the country for the rest.

At last week's Leper Mission meeting Dr. George W. McCoy, director of the Hygienic Laboratory of the U. S. Public Health Service, was brave enough to be pessimistic about reported cures of leprosy. He was for long director of the Leprosy Research Station at Molokai. As others, he injected chaulmoogra oil into the veins of lepers. The oil caused the lepers terrific pain. Often they fought against its use. Yet it seemed to stop the rodent, rotting, eating course of the disease. Chaulmoogra oil and its esters are the only medicines doctors know to treat leprosy. It is not a cure.

In Latvia a Jew named Kirstein was recently sentenced to death for murder. Against a horrible death he preferred a horrible living; he chose to be infected with leprosy and be used as an experiment at the Riga Leprosy Research Institute. Last week he was an inmate there. If cured, he will be a free man. If not, . . .

At Manhattan, police, alert with horror, last week patroled ferry, tube and tunnel terminals to prevent one John Desnatos sneaking into the city. A leper with a rash across his forehead, he had escaped from the isolation hospital at Belleville, N. Y.

Around to the other side of the world, in Sumatra, 29 men and women affected with leprosy attacked their guards last week with claws and teeth and horrid touch. The guards drew their pistols and killed ten of the lepers, wounded four others. The others ran back to their pens, gibbering and screaming.