The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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Most Of These Are Unfounded, And The Members Of The Board
Of Health Deserve Great Credit Both For Their Humanity And For Their
Prompt And Careful Attention To The Complaints Made By The
Sufferers.
At present the two obvious blots on the system are, the insufficient
house accommodation, involving a herding together which is repulsive
to foreign, though not to native, ideas; and the absence of a
resident physician to prescribe for the ailments from which leprosy
is no exemption.
Molokai, the island of exile, is Molokai aina
pali, "the land of precipices," in the old native meles, and its
walls of rock rise perpendicularly from the sea to a height varying
from 1000 to 2500 feet, in extreme grandeur and picturesqueness, and
are slashed, as on Hawaii, by gulches opening out on natural lawns
on the sea level. The place chosen for the centralization and
segregation of leprosy is a most singular plain of about 20,000
acres, hemmed in between the sea and a precipice 2000 feet high,
passable only where a zigzag bridle track swings over its face, so
narrow and difficult that it has been found impossible to get cattle
down over it, so that the leper settlement below has depended for
its supplies of fresh meat upon vessels. The settlement is
accessible also by a very difficult landing at Kalaupapa on the
windward side of Molokai.
Three miles inland from Kalaupapa is the leper village of Kalawao,
which may safely be pronounced one of the most horrible spots on all
the earth; a home of hideous disease and slow coming death, with
which science in despair has ceased to grapple; a community of
doomed beings, socially dead, "whose only business is to perish;"
wifeless husbands, husbandless wives, children without parents, and
parents without children; men and women who have "no more a portion
for ever in anything that is done under the sun," condemned to watch
the repulsive steps by which each of their doomed fellows passes
down to a loathsome death, knowing that by the same they too must
pass.
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