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.
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