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. He may have contracted the disease from them,
and it may have been well along in its mysterious period of
incubation at the time he was officially inoculated. Then there is
the case of that hero of the Church, Father Damien, who went to
Molokai a clean man and died a leper. There have been many theories
as to how he contracted leprosy, but nobody knows. He never knew
himself. But every chance that he ran has certainly been run by a
woman at present living in the Settlement; who has lived there many
years; who has had five leper husbands, and had children by them;
and who is to-day, as she always has been, free of the disease.
As yet no light has been shed upon the mystery of leprosy. When
more is learned about the disease, a cure for it may be expected.
Once an efficacious serum is discovered, and leprosy, because it is
so feebly contagious, will pass away swiftly from the earth. The
battle waged with it will be short and sharp. In the meantime, how
to discover that serum, or some other unguessed weapon? In the
present it is a serious matter. It is estimated that there are half
a million lepers, not segregated, in India alone. Carnegie
libraries, Rockefeller universities, and many similar benefactions
are all very well; but one cannot help thinking how far a few
thousands of dollars would go, say in the leper Settlement of
Molokai. The residents there are accidents of fate, scapegoats to
some mysterious natural law of which man knows nothing, isolated for
the welfare of their fellows who else might catch the dread disease,
even as they have caught it, nobody knows how. Not for their sakes
merely, but for the sake of future generations, a few thousands of
dollars would go far in a legitimate and scientific search after a
cure for leprosy, for a serum, or for some undreamed discovery that
will enable the medical world to exterminate the bacillus leprae.
There's the place for your money, you philanthropists.
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