THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1901. THE MOST HUMAN DISEASE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 49, 5 December 1901, Page 17

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1901. THE MOST HUMAN DISEASE.

!%2& * EPROSY has been described as the oldest and Jfl _ most human of all the diseases that flesh is heir ') S[J3l *-o. '^ ne discovery of a true or Asiatic case at Palmerston South, a few days ago has, for the J^M^^ moment, directed public attention, although in (M&? a somewhat languid way, to this most fearful V^K and mysterious of all the scourges that afflict *a* the human body. Ignorance may occasionally be blips, but it can never be folly to be wise. And a strange misconception seems to exist in the popular mind as to the place which leprosy occupies at the present day in the long and growing catalogue of diseases. The man on the street is satisfied that it is a malady of Bible times and Bible countries, with, possibly, the Hawaiian Islands and odd corners of China thrown in to keep up the continuity. As a matter of fact it is gnawing away at living human tissue in every quarter of Me globe. It is, moreover, apparently making a quiet forward move all along the line. In some places,°as in Colombia ami Russia, leprosy has spread at a serious rate during the past few decades, and in the Hawaiian Islands it, is threatening the native population with extinction. The prompt measures Uken by our Government to iso'ate the Palmerston case is a necessary act of wisdom to arrest the spread of a hideous disease which, after a partial annihilation, has contrived to secure so many points of vantage all over the world that, in the interests of public safety, it needs careful wa'ching. * The French mino^xnist l.iid n down that in every social trouble 'there's a woman in the case' And nowadays — what with bacteriology and its 'soups' and mediums and tubes and 'cultures '"—when it is a question of speciiic disease, it i>> a foregone conclusion that there's a bacillus at the root of the trouble. Leprosy is no exception to the rule. Theiv's a micro-orginism there, in very good sooth discovered by Professor Akmauek llansex among the leprous Norwegian patients at Bergen in 1871, and bearing a close family resemblance to the bacillus of consumption which Dr. Koch picked out with his big microscope in 1881. 'lhe leprosy bacillus increases ai.d multiplies almost as fast a« its cousin of tuberculosis and gnaws and burrows and poisons till its hapless \ictim's skin is 'thickened, puckered, and nodulated.' his face becomes hideous— we are gazing at a photographic group of the unfortunate? — the sight is dimmed or lost, the \oice becomes a raucous whisper, deep and incurable ulcers form all over the body. the bone is destroyed, the fingers, toes, etc., drop oil, and the victim begins to feei m life the dishonor of the tomb. Sometime, though rarely, the burrowing parasite goes about its work in a singularly lcihured way, and to the sufferer, death, like King Charlie, is l long a-eouiinV Mulhall, for instance, tells of a \eneruble dame of eighty who had spent fifty )ears of her long life as a patient on a leper-farm ;n Cyprus ; and we ha\e read of inmates of the great Home conducted by Catholic Sisters at Traeadie (New Brunswick) who suffered for half a century before death came to their relief. Professors Vikchow and AiiMAl'hk Han^fv ha\e pro\ed that the disease is not hereditary. And at the recent. Tubu"ulosis Congress in London Dr. Kocir emphatically av><-iud the contagiousness of leprosy, which (he said) X transmitted from person to person, ' but only when they come into close contact, as in small dwellings and bedrooms." The personal infection of the disease is, howevci, happily low, and the isolation of the

patients, as practised in the middle ages and at the present time in Norway, Molokai, etc , has been found the best preventive and the most efficacious method of exterminating the disease. * Statistics of leprosy have been pablished from time to time. But in all probability few of them are wholly reliable. AimMUS Ward's stormy experiences as a census collector are probably often repeated by Government agents going their melancholy rounds in search of lepers, for patients and their friends not unnaturally conceal the disease until it has made such headway that the dreaded isolation — the sentence which practically m?ans perpetual banishment — becomes at length inevitable. And yet the list is sufficiently high and covers a wide range of the earth's surface. The latest edition of his Dictionary of Statistics Mulhall gave the numbers of lepers in varions countries as follows : Canton, 10,000 ; Crete, 900 ; Greece, 350 ; Iceland, 13 ; India (1881), 131,600; Mauritius, 3300; Norway. 1770; Portugal, 3000 ; Reunion, GOO ; Rio Janeiro, 120 ; Sandwich Islands, 1800 ; Sweden, 100. 'In Russia,' says he, 'leprosy is found in sixty-five districts, and the number of fresh victims registered in 1887 was 615. This would lead us to suppose that the existing number of lepers in the Empire is about 6000.' Leprosy also occurs in Spain, Italy, Finland, Turkey, many of the Mediterranean islands, all round the coast of Africa, on Robben Island (Capetown), in Madagascar, the Seychelles Islands, New Brunswick (Canada), the United States, the West Indies, many parts of the South American continent, occasionally in Australia, and ' in all the countries and most of the islands on the south of Asia, from Arabia and Persia to China and Japan.' Here is ' a girdle round about the earth ' such as Puck never dreamed of on that midsummer night. We have stated that in some places leprosy has, during the past few decades, spread in a way that constitutes a danger to public heaah. In the Sandwich Islands it was apparently unknown before 1850. It now — as already stated — menaces the native race with extinction. During the nineteenth century the number of lepers in Colombia rose from a modest 1)7 to 30,000. In 1862 there were 27 patients in the leper village of Contratacon, now in charge of the Salesian Fathers. It now contains a leper population of about 1000 souls. One estimate before us states that there are over 250,000 lepers in India. Some eleven years ago Sir Morell Mackenzie, who had made specia investigations on leprosy, wrote as follows in the Nineteenth Cm f my on its prevalence in Europe -. 'Portugal has more lepers than any other European country except Norway. In Italy leprosy is met with on the Genoese Riviera ; it was also found till quite recently at Comacchio, in the Ferrara marshes. In Sicily the disease has been steadily spreading for the last thirty or forty years. In annexing Nice, France took over with it a considerable number of Italian lepers belonging to Le Turbie and neighboring places, but the disease is now almost extinct in these localities. Small fan of leprosy still exist in Thessaly and Macedonia; the affection is not rare in some of the .Egean islands — e.f/., Samos, Rhodes, Chios, and Mitylene, — and it is extraordinarily prevalent in Crete. It is spreading to an alarming degree in Russia, especially in the Baltic provinces, and it, has lately been found necessary to establish a special hospital at Riga. In St. Petersburg cases are occasionally, though very rarely, met with ; at least half of them are imported from outlying provinces. " Sporadic " cases are said to occur in some parts of Hungary and Roumania. In Sweden, where the disease was extremely prevalent up to the beginning of the present [nineteenth] century, it seems now to have almost died out. Norway is unquestionably the most considerable leprosy centre in Europe at the present day, but the disease is curiously limited to particular regions, such as the districts round Bergen, J\lolde j and Trondbjem.' * Some years ago a writer in the Arc Maria said : ' Lep.osy is unquestionably milking headway in the United States. Its seeds have been sown in Louisiana, lowa, Illinois, Utah, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Cases are numerous among the Chinese of the Pacific coast and wherever else they have congregated. Dr. Blanc recently

reported the existence of forty-two cases of the disease in IS'ew Orleans alone.' There is happily no present risk of leprosy getting a hold upon New Zealand, and the Health Department is to be complimented on the prompt steps which they take to i?-olate such cases as arise and thus prevent the natural evolution of this worst of all the maladies that infest the human body. But leprosy is clearly not an enemy to parley with. And the health authorities of the Commonwealth — with its influx of colored population lrom th<* stricken areas of the Far Ease — would do well to rend and ponder well tho warning conveyed in Charles Warren Stoddard's fearfully fascinating book, Tlw Lepers of Mulokai.