VICTIM OF LEPROSY RESEARCH

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2471, 26 May 1915, Page 5

VICTIM OF LEPROSY RESEARCH

Sir George Turner. M.8., M.R.0.5., who died in Devon last month, was a victim to leprosy research. It was in. 1902 that Dr. Turner began to devote himself to the noblest work of his life. There was then a leper asylum at Pretoria with about 50 Dutch and 40 native patients. He gave up all his Bpare time to work among the lepers, doing all he could to alleviate their lot, and prosecuting a tireless research into the nature of the disease. . For three years he laboured at his work without extra pay. He saw the lepers early in the morning, and again when he oame home in the evening. Saturday and Sunday he gave to them entire. In addition to this lie made ae many post-mortem examinations as possible in his laboratory, rising at dawn in order t-o have time for his work. The asylum contains a large number of lepers, Europeans as well as native, and a visitor who watched Dr. Turner moving amongst, them in the asylum beare witness to the passionate devotion with which he was regarded by all its inmates. The saddest feature of these institutions is afforded by the leper children born of leper parents, for in every case several members of a leper family are admitted together. As the medical superintendent movod about the asylum, which is in the nature of a village, he was usually followed by a crowd of these unfortunate children, by whom ho was adored. On reaohing the age limit Dr. Turner retired, to pursue his studies into the bacteriological side of leprosy in the laboratories of England. It had always been the ambition of his life to find some remedy for the disease. After several years of work in England his eye w«6 attracted by certain marks on his hand while he was shaving, and he recognised them at once as the stamp of the disease which he had set himself to fight. His diagnosis was independently confirmed by two specialists, to whom he went at once, and from that time he worked unswervingly amid the pain and beneath the shadow of a leper's lot.