THE MAORI LEPER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 439, 22 October 1908, Page 4

THE MAORI LEPER.

A Sceptical Medico.

Christchurch, October 17

Mr R. H. Bakewell, of Onehunga, formerly physician to the Leper Asylum, Trinidad, in a letter to a Christchurch paper on the subject of the Maori leper patient recently discharged from Quail Island as cured by the Nastin treatment, questions the permanency of the cure. He says : “ Even when a cure has been effected the patient canont return to the diet, evironments, and habits in which he lived when he contracted the disease, I have seen many hopeful cases, when every visible trace of the disease had been removed, relapse, because the patients went back to their old homes, and resumed the habits, diet, etc., which had been the original cause of the malady. If the Maori who has been treated in the Lyttelton quarantine station goes back to some filthy Maori hovel, and eats sharks’ flesh and other fish salted or half putrid, sleeps in ill-ventilated huts, and generally falls back to the habits of his people, it is almost certain that, if he does not die of accident or some acute disease, he will be attacked by leprosy.”