THE HONOLULU SETTLEMENT FOR LEPERS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3529, 30 October 1882, Page 4

THE HONOLULU SETTLEMENT FOR LEPERS.

The following painful account of tho settlement set apart for lepers in the Sandwich Island., is from tho pen of a, recent visitor : ' I went with Dr. Fitch to the branch settlement fo- lepers. It is an enclosure of several acres on what is called Fisherman's Point, on Honolulu Bay. Scattered over the grounds are scores of cottages, some connected, others detached, and the offices and buildings used by Doctor Fitch's assistants. Imagine, if you can, a settlement of Anglo-Saxons, or people of any other highly civilized race, all of them afflicted with, and more or less deformed, by an incurable and horrible disease — .knowing it to be incurable, and seeing themselves and each other dropping to pieces from its dread effects. I cannot imagine such a picture, because I honestly believe that suicide would make a settlement impossible among any other than a people still barbarians, or else in the childhood of civilisation. Such was the settlement I visited. There were men, women and children living in a world apart from ours, having nothing worth living for save mere existence, a succession of days, marked only by slow consummation of the death that had already seized upon their bodies, and had already deprived them of portions, which were already returned to dust. There were i_i that strange and unnatural community, marriages, births, deaths. I ■would not attempt to describe in detail the unrelieved ghastliness of the sights there, yet not one of the inmates who helped to make up the absolute dread fulness of the scene failed to greet us with a smile and cordial aloha. That only served to emphasize the darkness of the picture. I said not one ; yet there was one. On a bed in a little cottage room, whose open door faced ,'tho dark, cool cannons back of the city, and -whose window looked out upon the lovely bay and let in the lazy murmur of waves breaking over the coral reefs, lay a native woman, dying. Nearly all of her right hand had dropped [off, but in the remnants of her fingers she held a feather fan which she faintly waved across her distorted face, to cool the hot, aching eyes that had not here closed for months, the palsied muscles of her eyelids refusing their duty. As the doctor spoke pleasantly to her, she turned her glaring eyes towards vis, but did not speak. ' Her mouth is affected, too,' the doctor said. We stood aside from her door to admit a cooling breath of air that just then came down from the mountains. The s-woollen face rested, and the feebly moving hand fell, in gratitude for the mountain breeze, yet, when it died away, the hand did not move again ; it was her last moment. The mountain's gentle breath had comforted her, and when it died away her breathiug ceased too. In one cottage we saw a little girl whose fingers had been drawn up until her hand Was half closed. She bad expez-imenteel -with a novel cur*, by calmly stepping on the bent fingers until she had straightened them out. She exhibited the result -with pride ; four fingers straight and stiff, and as useful as so many wooden pegs would have been. Out on what is called the play ground were some boys playing ball, one with a ■useless hand, another with a palsied leg, another with a foot partly gone, and others -with swollen, senseless faces. On the veranda of a cottage sat two old natives, both with useless legs, but neither of whom showed any trace of leprosy in face or hands. As I watched them one began chanting a hulu hulu, accompanying it with appropriate movements of his hands. Possibly, observing the look of astonishment on my face, the old man's companion, with a meaning wink at me joined in the chant, and soon both the old lepers were chanting and waving their hands in the sensuous measures of the hulu hulu. It was a dance of death indeed ; Punchinello's mask over a moulding skull.; a rollicking revelry in a charnel house ; life mocking a gaping tomb. The medical profession here in Honolulu is in terrific dispute about what leprosy is (!) and whether or not it is contagious. This, of course, is an old dispute, but it has been revived, with great violence by the assertion of Dr. Fitch that it is, if not curable, amenable in a large degree to treatment, and that it is not contagious from ordinary contact, such as would demand the transportation of lepers into isolation. Dr. Fitch has been here two years, and naturally his youthful but dogmatical contradictions of tho theories of the old and experienced practitioners has raised a discussion of a rather warm nature. However, his practice appeals to the sympathies of the natives, and he has a largo, if rather ignorant, following,