LEPERS LIVE AGAIN

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 22, 26 January 1929, Page 15

LEPERS LIVE AGAIN

There is a man living at Fusan, in Korea, who poops cautiously over his wall every morning with his heart full of fear. Ho is afraid to sec dead men lying there, men who cried pitifully ■ at his gate for admission last night, "Let us in! Grant us life!" Those are their words. , "I cannot," he tells them, day after day. "There is no more room." But they will not depart. Even in tho winter they lie shivering at his door, and sometimes there- are thirty of them there for weeks, without shelter or bedding. Their cries reach the ears of the men inside, who can do nothing for them. These men are lepers. The .Fusan Leper Homo is always overcrowded, and tho funds only suffice to feed 500j and so the Scotsman who rules it cannot help the outcasts at the gate. The Japanese police will not allow them to enter the Japanese part of the town, and they have been driven out of their own villages.

But the tragedy of the lepers, terrible though it is, is not as dark as it used to be, for there was once no hope of cure, and now English and American doctors have discovered new treatments which work wonders. Last year the Soonchun Leper Colony alone discharged 300 men as cured. All over the East and in Africa there are homes and hospitals where white doctors and nurses aro fighting leprosy.- Some of these doctors are missionaries and some aro not, but a great number of the lepers become Christians because they find' that' only Christians will befriend a leper. ' . ' One day Dr. A. B. Mac Donald told a Nigerian that he was now cured and could leave the- leper colony at Itu. The man said, "Let me stay." "I cannot feed you," said the doctor. "I. must feed those who are ill. You must get food from your own friends at home."

The doctor's head servant said: "Sir, he may go home, but he will not get any food. When a man becomes a leper, he is looked upon as a dead body."

There is a belief in the native's mind that a man is a leper for ever if he has once had leprosy. They will iiot give him work or recognise him as a kinsman. But the white doctors and Government officials liavo a remedy for that also. They create self-supporting leper villages. While the lepers are patients, receiving treatment which may last three years or longer, they are taught basket or mat making, agriculture, weaving, and pottery. Special care is spent on leper children, who usually-arrive weeping bitterly at leaving home, and are frightened. Soon the children are coaxed into playing happily, .and in. time they are cured. Such is. the spirit which is striving to wipe out leprosy everywhere. In Nigeria it costs about half, a crown a week to feed a leper, and in some parts of India they are given food, clothes, and drugs at a cost of 14s Od a month. The good work 1 spreads and spreads, and one.- day, thanks to heroic doctors and nurses,, there will be no more lepers crying at the gate.

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