A VISIT TO THE LEPER HOSPITAL OF BERGEN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 765, 29 October 1886, Page 8

A VISIT TO THE LEPER HOSPITAL OF BERGEN.

Sunday Magazine. One of the most quaint and generally delightful towns in Europe is little Bergen. Situated as it is between the Hardanger and the Sogne Fiords, it is naturally a point of interest to the English tourists in Norway. The town is surrounded by lofty hills up whose slopes its streets and roads climb. The feet of the hills are washed by an arm of the

sea, on which may be seen from the town masts of fishing boats through vistas of brilliant green foliage. The waterway is hedged by mountains whose verdant tints fade into warm gray the higher they rise, the flinty shale cropping through the thinning herbage. It was on a bright afternoon in August, just like a crisp September one in England, that we walked out of Bergen, leaving the harbor market behind us, with its stalks of red fish and ripe fruits. We had bought very large currants and ripe sharp cherries from a white-capped clear old woman sitting under a gray umbrella in the sunshine, and went off in our quest of Spidalshie, the leper asylum. For Norway, the grand and fair, the land of invigorating breezes, of mighty fosses, of far-stretching glaciers, of salt water fjords running inland for a hundred and fifty miles ; Norway, the health-giving and beautiful, and the last country where one would expect to meet with such an awful disease as leprosy, is to-day in fact its European home. Leprosy, which the Crusaders brought back with them from Palestine in the fifteenth century, ravaged their homes with more ruthless fury than ever those soldiers had pillaged the Paladin’s land with fire and sword. The disease had existed before thafftime, but now its rapid increase caused vigorous measures to be taken. Nineteen thousand lazar houses arose in Europe, and in every land the lepers were sought out and separated from their neighbors. Even in our old churches we still have the distinct chapels from which, themselves unseen, they could see the ceremony of the Mass. Norway was the only land where this system was not adopted, and while the disease has disappeared in other lands, in this, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, it still lives. The only cure for leprosy is segregation. Dr Armaner Hansen the greatest authority in Norway on this subject, considers the disease contagious—not hereditary ; and so rapid was the increase of the scourge that it cast a dark and ever-increas-ing cloud over the land, as at length, in 1853, the government were convinced that leper hospitals were a national necessity. Norway is a poor country ; the revenue is barely £1,000,000 annually, and yet out of this sum £20,000 is expended in fighting this disease. Three asylums were built and opened in the year 1856. The first at Tronjhiem, for the northern division of the country ; the second at Molde, for the Nordland ; and the third and largest at Bergen for the south. And the three were capable of accommodating 800 patients. In 1866 there were 795 occupants ; in 1830 the number was 617. Id spite of their persistent unwillingness to use the hospitals (which is now driving the Government to seek more compulsory legal powers of isolating the sick, if not in the national asylums then in their own honjes), hpw good this would be for the whole community, even if it is sad for the individuals affected ! As the case now stands, paupers only can be compelled to enter the hospitals ; and we met in the open streets with cases, one of them a farmer’s wife carrying a basket of butter and eggs into the market. Only a short distance you go, perhaps half a mile, when you stop at a picturesque wooden house—it is the oldest and smallest of the hospitals. This is the Lungegaaad Hospital, under the charge of old Dr Danielssen, where those cases are admitted which are suited to early and energetic treatment. Many remedies have been given a fair trial, but without any uniformly successful results. All that drugs have effected so far has been to give some little relief to suffering. We were told that some of the early stages of the disease were very painful, but that when it has fully developed physical suffering ceases, and certainly few of the many patients we met gave signs , of being in pain. We entered a paved courtyard surrounded by two-storied buildings, and passing into an untidy kitchen made our way into a long old hall which was spotlessly clean, and which was surrounded at half its height by a carved and painted gallery. On to the floor of this hall and into the gallery open the doors of little dormitories. Each room has a red covered bed, and plants in the windows. Most of the little cells were empty. Our guide (whose eyes were affected) and some women sitting out in the courtyard in the sunshine knitting, were the only lepers we saw save one man with a strangely white face, who leaned over the gallery to look at us. One or two doors slammed as though their occupants did not desire to be seen ; but in the other two hospitals great curiosity to look at us prevailed, and the leDers surrounded us willingly. This house, number 3, contained seventy patients. Most of them we saw had deformed hands, some had swollen faces, and our doctor pointed out that one of. the women basking on the bench was getting her neck scratched by a neighbor, the itching of the leper being at times intolerable. In the Lungegaard asylum ihe air was pleasant, and both the halls we saw were well ventilated. The whole place was much like an old-fashioned almshouse in England. About two hundred vards farther up the road we came to the other and larger hospitals. These are erected in the. same grounds, but are quite distinct. A pretty lodge covered with clematis and climbiDg roses stands at the dividing gates. The gardens are lovely, sweet, and bright with flowers of many kinds. The first room we entered was one on the ground floor. Here we found three lepers : one badly deformed, but not unsightly, was making up fishing nets and fixing the corks on to them ; he showed up his work proudly. t A second was mending shoes—some of th'ese were not to be called shoes, so extraordinary was their shape, or rather their unshapeliness. This man did not wish apparently to be noticed, so only our doctor went forward to speak to him. His face, from the glimpse we took, appeared horrible ; it was purple, and swollen out of shape. There was a strange faint smell in the room which we did not perceive in the Lungegaard hospital. Next we went upstairs. The passages were yellow-washed and clean, and an intelligent old nurse went round this to the women’s department with us, and we observed she unlocked most of the doors before we could enter. The rooms or wards were all panelled with wood and painted light green; they contained six or eight beds each —the usual light iron ones—with comfortable mattresses and red coverlets. In all the windows were flowers and plants, many being myrtles trained to resemble round-clipped box or yew trees. The rooms were well lighted with lovely views all brightness outside, but hor-

rible —especially where the worst cases were dwelling—from want of ventilation. In vain do the doctors throw open the windows in their morning inspection. Used at home to crowding together in. small hot habitations, the Norwegian peasantry cannot endure fresh air in their rooms, and compulsory ventilation is about to be resorted to in the hospitals. When we were there the atmosphere was unbearable. In both the male and female hospitals there were large rooms set apart as general workrooms. In their apartment the women were carding wool, and then, with the old spinning-wheels we only see at home as curiosities, they were twisting the wool into yarn, and other patients were knitting it up. The men were provided with a joiner’s shop, and in another room stood frames on which they were winding string, which their companions were using to net into trawling-nets. Our conductress showed us the church, a plain, large, and very clean room, with a crimson-covered communion-table and two brass candlesticks on it, and a tall gilt cross. The figures of the hymns, of which five were selected for the morning service and four for the afternoon, were made of tin and stuck on to black-boards, so that the weakest eyes could Bee them. Everywhere the poor patients were pleased to see us. I suppose our visit was a break in the hopeless monotony of their lives. One of the women’s wards myself and my young lady friend were not entering, but the doctor said, * Do come in, they want to see English ladies.’ They chatted about our clothes and appearance'to each other, and tried to talk to us and make us understand their mode of working. Quite a little crowd followed us to the doorway, and a sad one it was to look on ; not one face without its disfigurement. Sadder to us than all the awful contortions and deformities we saw was to behold in one of the women’s rooms, knitting with the others, a lovely girl. For years she may live on—some do for thirty or forty years after their admission, though mercifully 17‘2 percent die between twenty and thirty years of age, and 40 per cent between thirty and fifty years. Yet some live to an old age. If any are ever cured they are, as Dr Hansen observed sorrowfully, * ruins of human being.’