New Hospital For Lepers

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32120, 16 October 1969, Page 14

New Hospital For Lepers

The life and work of Patrick Joseph Twomey, who became known throughout New Zealand and beyond as the Leper Man, will be commemorated in the new Leprosy Hospital for Fiji, to be opened next month on Tamavua Heights, four miles from Suva, and close to the site of a New Zealand Army hospital during the war. Mr Twomey worked for lepers and other sick people in the South Pacific for more! than 40 years and it is in appreciation of his efforts that the Fiji Government has decided to call the new institution, . the P. J. Twomey Memorial Hospital. Doctors, nurses and patients are preparing for the move from the famous old hospital on the island of Makogai to their new home on the Fijian mainland. For decades, the Central Leprosy Hospital, Makogai, was the only leprosarium in the South Pacific and at the outset, the work of the Lepers’ Trust Board was concentrated on providing comforts and amenities for its patients. Makogai was originally known as the Island of Death because lepers were sent there to die; but with the aid of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy, who staffed the hospital, there have been tremendous advances—notably by the use of the sulphone drugs. Segregation is no longer necessary if the disease is diagnosed in time and it is hoped that bringing the patients to Suva will help them to take a normal place in society as soon as they are cured. Makogai is a lovely island but to be sent to so remote a place carried a suggestion of being an outcast—an unhappy reaction which will certainly not apply to those who will be treated and cured at the P. J. Twomey Memorial Hospital, to which the people of New Zealand, through the Lepers’ Trust Board’s Leper Man Appeal, have contributed more than $lOO,OOO.