Leprosy

In Newark, N. J., a public school teacher asked so simple a question that almost everyone knew the answer. But the woman, as she gazed down the row of small, lifted hands, forgot what she had asked, for she had caught sight of one small fist whose aspect caused her, inexplicably, to shudder. It was not dirtier than the others; it was not mis-hapen, and it was unmarked except for a few minutes bulging sores. Yet if gave her an indefinable and malign impression of deformity, of horror. She sent the boy attached to the hand--one Frank George, 11--to Dr. E. D. Newman, skin specialist. A short time afterward this medico asked to see the boy's brother, one Hale George, 13. The two boys did not return to school. There was some whispering and then, without ostentation, the books and desks which they had used were burned. Their parents had emigrated from Bermuda where, the specialist affirmed, the lads had doubtless contracted, six years previously, the thing that afflicted them. For in spite of all reticence, the grisly fact, once discovered, could not be concealed. The two George boys had leprosy.

Leprosy (the grey death), according to certain medieval conjecturers, issued in the form of a woman's body with a rat's head from the grave of the stillborn Antichrist; scientists have lately suggested that it is bred from putrid fish. Rising out of the East, it has crept down the centuries, a slow, fatal smoke, eating in secret. When Godfrey de Bouillon rode against the Paladin in the 11th Century, it withered the flesh of his captains under their painted armor, followed their retreating banners into Europe. Contagious, it is never hereditary.

Symptoms, in the beginning, are those which attend the incubation of various diseases--irregular fever dizziness, hyperaesthesia of the skin, pains in the arms and legs, loss of sexual power. Forebodings appals the sufferer; faceless shapes of doom brawl in his mind; ulcers corrupt his arms; his skin greys; his eyebrows, loosened, overhang his eyes like disheveled blinds; while his voice shrinks and becomes raucous, as if he contended for possession of it with an evil spirit. Little by little, as his body rots, an odor pervades it, more deathly and infinitely more revolting than that of the carnal house; the bones of his nose break off; toes, fingers, ears, drop away like dead hair. Insanity follows, terminated by death. In rare instances, the disease unaccountably vanishes, after eight years or so.

Occasional cures are affected--in Hawaii, with Chaulmoogra oil; in the U. S. with injections of bichloride of mercury, with arsenic; X-ray treatment affects temporary relief. Lepers are daily boiled in hot baths; given strychnine; put on a diet. After a period of eight years, the disease sometimes vanishes.

In the U. S., Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Minnesota are endemically affected. More than one-third of the states of the U. S. have, from time to time, recorded cases. Massachusetts provides state institutional care for lepers. It is almost impossible for leprosy to spread in the climate of the Northern U. S. So slight is the danger of infection that the act of destroying the school effects of the young Newark lazars was rather a sop to Nemesis than a scientific necessity.

Colonies for lepers are many. In India alone there are 8,850 lepers and 92 asylums. Just inside the East gate of Canton live 1,400 grey men; more lodge at Hokchiang, at Purulia; there is a famed colony at Molokai, Hawaii; an even more elaborate one on the island of Culion, Philippines, established by the U. S. at great expense in 1906; where the lepers have their own stores, theatres and a special kind of currency.