THE SPREAD OF LEPROSY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1682, 5 January 1888, Page 3

THE SPREAD OF LEPROSY.

In a letter to the Times, Archdeacon Wright calls attention to the rapid spead of leprosy and to the need for precautionary measures against the disease. He says:—ln all parts of the world attention is being directed to leprosy, for this good reason — leprosy is spreading far arid wideband in some regions with ia fearful rapidity. Forty years ago the malady was unknown in California, New Brunswick, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Sandwich Islands; but now so dominant is the disease that they all have leper settlements and leper hospitals, and in the Sandwich Islands so severe is the visitation that there are 800 lepers congregated at Molokua. The Chinese are swarming all over the, world, and, living as they do, closely packed and careless of all sanitary precaution, their huts are especially calculated to hasten the incubation of a disease the germ of which was brought from China. The Celestials mingle freely with Europeans; indeed, so also do the leprous) in every quarter of the globe. And what is the result? Leprosy is showing itself so frequently and so continuously in Europe that the most learned and experienced physicians are becoming alarmed. Leprosy they maintain, is strictly man’s disease, and wherever lepers travel there invariably leprosy is in due season conveyed to their fellow-men. Only a few weeks ago (October 11th), Dr Ernest Besnier, addressing the French Academy of Medicine, of which he is a highly distinguished member, gave the following sad and startling facts: —“There is not at this moment in Paris a medical man devoted to dermatology who has not lepers among his patients, and who does not see every year a certain number of new cases. Europeans who have caught the disease in leprous countries or inhabitants of such countries, try by change of climate to obtain bodily relief. Every year soldiers, sailors, sisters of charity, and others, bring back with them the malady into France, and in Paris the St. Louis hospital receives constantly lepers in all stages of the disease. Only recently M, Tidal received under his care a soldier who had contracted leprosy in Cayenne, while I myself admitted a sailor who had returned from Madagascar.” The doctor then names several other cases, ending with a young Frenchman who bad been employed in the Consulate at Bio Janeiro; another horn at Port-au-Prince of healthy parents; and an Italian merchant just returned a leper from Buenos same ex-

perience precisely is that of Dr Besnier’s colleagues of the St. Louis Hospital, and of a large number of hydrologists, especially at Bagnerei de Luchon, TJriage, La Bourbule, etc. In concluding, the Archdeacon states that cases of leprosy are not so rare as is generally supposed. At this moment there are lepers in the hospitals of London, Dublin, and Glasgow.