They Are Baffled In The Discovery Of A Serum Wherewith To Fight The
Disease.
And in all their work, as yet, they have found no clue, no
cure.
Sometimes there have been blazes of hope, theories of
causation and much heralded cures, but every time the darkness of
failure quenched the flame. A doctor insists that the cause of
leprosy is a long-continued fish diet, and he proves his theory
voluminously till a physician from the highlands of India demands
why the natives of that district should therefore be afflicted by
leprosy when they have never eaten fish, nor all the generations of
their fathers before them. A man treats a leper with a certain kind
of oil or drug, announces a cure, and five, ten, or forty years
afterwards the disease breaks out again. It is this trick of
leprosy lying dormant in the body for indeterminate periods that is
responsible for many alleged cures. But this much is certain: AS
YET THERE HAS BEEN NO AUTHENTIC CASE OF A CURE.
Leprosy is FEEBLY CONTAGIOUS, but how is it contagious? An Austrian
physician has inoculated himself and his assistants with leprosy and
failed to catch it. But this is not conclusive, for there is the
famous case of the Hawaiian murderer who had his sentence of death
commuted to life imprisonment on his agreeing to be inoculated with
the bacillus leprae. Some time after inoculation, leprosy made its
appearance, and the man died a leper on Molokai. Nor was this
conclusive, for it was discovered that at the time he was inoculated
several members of his family were already suffering from the
disease on Molokai.
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