Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1908-09-08
dflistcllanruu5 8eading.
THE LEPRoSY DELUSION.
Disease Is One of the Least Contagious
of Those Due to Germs.

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of Those Due to Germs.
'Tis not only truth that crushed to
earth will rise again. Popular error,
especially if ancient enough, has the
same buoyant faculty. When the dis
covery of case Of leprosy in a poor
young Russian servant girl in Boston
was announced recently, the papers of
the land fared with headlines and a
wave of horror and dread swept over
the community. Frenzied space writer's
glOated over the appearance Of the
dread scourge in our midst" and Won
dered copiously what the health Off
GERS would do when the crop of infect
ed victims began to show itself. Sim
ilarly, last year, when a Syrian exile
was found to have a mild case of lep-
rosy, great commonwealths WED with
each other in the savagery with which
they drove him from their borders,
and, when he was at length found dead
Of cold and starvation in the half-ruin-
ed hut into which he had been driven
at the muzzle of rifles with an occa-
sional bullet sent through the roof to
keep him in order, everybody breathed
sigh Of relief and said: Poor fell
low! best thing that could happen to
him." These are but exhibitions Of
the cruelty which is born Of cowardice
and founded upon the terror Of abys-
NAL ignorance.
Few things are more utterly un-
founded than the popular dread of lep-
rosy The prevalent conceptions Of the
disease are as grotesquely mistaken as
the famous definition of a crab given
by one of Agassiz's students: "a little
red fish that walks backward" The
great professor, you remember, smiled
quietly and remarked: VERY good
except that a crab is not fish, is not
red until he had been boiled, and does
not walk backward but sidewise."
The three features in the prevailing
idea of leprosy-that it is intensely
contagious, absolutely incurable, and
inevitably fatal-are almost as thor
ough diversions of the actual fact.
Leprosy is one of the least conta-
gious of all diseases known to be due
to bacillus. Ten cases Of leprosy at
large would be a lesser source Of dan
ger to the commonwealth Of Massa-
chusetts than one case of ordinary
consumption. In the great European
hospitals cases Of leprosy are kept for
months and even years in the open
wards, with thirty or forty other pa
tients to be exhibited to students and
visiting physicians, without the slight
est fear Of contagiOn. White men liv-
ing upon civilized diet seldom contract
the disease even in the tropics, but
when they do, and return home with
it, they almost invariably recover,
and never have been known in single
instance to communicate the disease
to others. not even to members Of their
own family. Osler relates the case of
an eminent clergyman who was leper
for thirty years without it even inter-
fering with his work, or any one save
his physician suspecting the fact A
civilized community, properly fed and
housed is in no more danger from a
case of imported leprosy than it would
be from one of beriberi, or scurvy, or
cancer, or clubfoot. The leper house or
colony is a survivor Of barbarism and
medical ignorance pure and simple,
and as unnecessary as it is cruel.
Instead of leprosy being hopelessly
incurable. cases in Europeans, which
are recognized early and given prompt
change Of climate and food, usually get
well or come to a standstill. Although
it is due to a well-recognized germ,
the bacillus leprae Of Hansen, the chief
factors in it's development are food and
sanitary conditions. Whenever these
are brought up to. or even toward mod
nrn standards, leprosy rapidly disap-
nears-Collier's Weekly.