The leprosarium of the Pacific islands in which I once worked was situated next to the Mental Wing, as the psychiatric hospital was known. The lepers derived considerable pleasure and hilarity from watching the antics of the lun- atics through the fence that separated them. This taught me an unedifying principle of human psychology, that the existence of people upon whom one can look down is a great solace in misfortune, no matter how grievous.
Generally speaking, however, sufferers from leprosy have had no one upon whom to look down. They have been outcasts, cruelly separated from the rest of humanity and cut off even from their own families. Their disease, rarely and only slowly fatal, is horribly disfiguring when untreated; quite unreasonably, it has had derogatory moral connotations attached to it, and has been seen as a punishment for personal shortcoming rather than as a natural phenomenon.
Precisely because sufferers have been stigmatised so unjustly, leprosy has for long attracted Christian missionaries, who by displaying compassion for the insulted and injured, despised by everyone else, believe themselves to be giving evidence of their faith in and love of God, hoping by their example to win a harvest of souls. Leprosy is the missionary disease par excellence.
In this absorbing and even inspiring book, Tony Gould gives us an episodic history of leprosy in the last two centuries. It is the history of advance, both scientific and moral, from ignorance and prejudice to knowledge and enlightenment. The path might have been twisted, but on the whole it was upward, with modern treatment of the disease rendering traditional isolation of sufferers completely unjustified. Nevertheless, final victory over the condition is far from assured; and precisely because it is the least communicable of communicable diseases, and affects relatively small numbers of people compared with many other diseases, there is the probability that sufferers might in the future be neglected rather than persecuted.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in