Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the sexes were thrust apart. The problems and the anguish that beset a normal married couple outside the
colony when one of the parties suddenly develops leprosy may be imagined.
The last house to which Dr. Campbell took us was the infirmary for advanced cases of the disease's
more violent form. It was a pathetic sight. The patients were most of them past middle age, but one or
two whose malady had been neglected since infancy were fairly young. Here we saw distorted and dis-
coloured members, fingers missing or swollen or twisted out of shape, and limbs with their truncated
extremities tapering into a mass of bandages. Faces were distorted by nodules which clustered on the
skin like clumps of oak-apples, and the features in some instances had fallen into a curious leonine cast,
which Dr. Campbell told us is one of the best-known stigmata of the disease. Some of the lepers were half
paralysed, and others completely crippled. Three or four nuns in their white tropical habits were mov-
ing about among the beds, bringing food, dressing sores, changing bandages, and sitting talking to these
poor people. Many of them brightened up at Dr. Campbell's appearance. He stopped and talked to all of
them, resting his hand on their shoulders, or making some quiet joke, or (to me, inexplicably) evoking
a look of interest and pleasure by saying, 'Look, Mary (or Richard), I've brought some friends of mine
to see you.' They all seemed to cheer up, and the atmosphere of the place, which might have been one
of Stygian despair, was astonishingly cheerful, and imbued with a feeling of unforced normality which is
noticeable in the whole of the colony. Contemplating those tragic distortions and mutilations, the apathy
and melancholia which Dr. Campbell had suggested were the greatest danger in a leper colony became
doubly understandable; and the fact that it existed, or appeared to exist, so little, still more remarkable.
We came out again into the prospect of the shining sea and the palm trees with feelings of admiration and
sober pity and of a furtive, guilty relief.
As the boat sailed away from the island, we watched the white figure of Dr. Campbell walk back to
his little house at the water's side, on the outskirts of the leper village.
Leprosy has no specific cure. Until recently Chaulmoogra oil and its derivatives were the standard
treatment. For the last five years, since treatment on new lines was started at Carville, the U.S. National
Leprosarium, encouraging results have been reported from the use of various sulphone derivatives, such
as diasone, promin and promizole. The last words on this theme I will leave to Dr. Campbell himself
[2]
:
'The discoveries made by chemists who have sought for drugs which will kill bacteria have been so re-
markable that there is every hope that a cure for leprosy will one day be found. Meanwhile we can help
the leper with all the resources which modern civilization can muster. If we cannot cure him, we can do
everything possible to alleviate the sufferings of his body. The sufferings of his mind, which spring from
the knowledge that he is, so far as human society is concerned, already dead, are not so easily alleviated.
Yet much can be done to mitigate even this appalling knowledge. There have been many men for whom,
for various reasons, the world has been of little account, and their lives have proved that, even for the
outcast from human society, there yet remains a great deal that is exhilarating, valuable and satisfying to
the human soul.'
The Pitch Lake of Trinidad sounds satanic, and, indeed, it is; but not exactly in the seething, Phlegethontic
fashion that one might suppose. It is the blankness, the emptiness, the boredom of this expanse that fills
the observer with horror. It has the colour and texture of a gramophone record a hundred and fourteen
acres in extent, channelled and broken up by a network of cracks, where the surface softens into black
treacle treacherously covered by a thin wrinkled skin. It is one of the hottest places in the world. Into the
middle of this broiling disc runs a miniature railway, and an army of dark navvies hack lumps of reeking
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