A MODERN MARI YR.
THE public have been learning, piecemeal and slowly, the story of the splendid devotion of Dr. George Turner, who received a knighthood in the last list of honours. According to a narrative in the Times of Sir George Turner's work for the lepers of South Africa, the honour was the result of the King's own suggestion. The self-sacrifice of Sir, George Turner was enough to dignify any historical act of knightliness that one might care to pick out for comparison. We may all justly feel that we are to be blamed for not having paid long before this, by public attention to Sir George Turner's labours, a tribute of respect to his heroism; but that reflection brings simultaneously the consoling thought that there must be a good deal of heroism if heroism can escape general notice for several years. The supply of martyrs is not likely to run short. When there is a call for them they are to be found. The self-sacrifice of Sir George Turner, who is now himself a leper, might be matched in some sense several times over, no doubt: there are men and women who have given up their lives to permanent association with lepers in the leper colonies of India and else- where ; but the peculiar virtue of Sir George Turner's case is that while he was spending bis energy in other exacting causes he spontaneously gave up his leisure to visiting the lepers and to scientifically studying the origin and treatment of one of the most ghastly and forbidding diseases known to man.
There is no disease which has laid so strong a hold on the imagination of Englishmen as leprosy. This is a strange fact, since Englishmen as a nation are for all ordinary purposes no longer subject to the disease. Cholera and plague are words of dread, and it is less unlikely that parts of Great Britain might be ravaged by either of them than by leprosy. Yet the not unfamiliar accounts of both cholera and plague in distant lands in our own time, and all the art of Defoe in describing the plague of London, have not sufficed to horrify the fancy of a modern English child like stories of leprosy. The symbolic contagion of leprosy seems to cling to it. In Eastern lands the thought of moral turpitude, of sin and divine punishment, is never far removed from the disease. Social privilege and spiritual grace are yielded up by the non- Christian leper without a thought of being aggrieved. He patiently acknowledges himself the fit subject of a penalty he can neither explain nor avert. He does not dispute that he must live in isolation, a castaway. As often as not he changes his name, lest disgrace should fall upon the name he had, borne in fair repute before his exposure by the hand of Fate.
What martyr of modern times is better known to English- men than Father Damien, who consecrated himself to the service of the Hawaiian lepers at Molokai and died of their disease ? But the chief reason why leprosy remains a vivid reality to Englishmen lies in the Authorized Version of the Old Testament. Who that has ever read it can banish from his mind the grand terribleness of the story of Naaman
Aeschylus does not exceed the tragic sublimity of the chapter which begins : "Now Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master, and honourable, because
by him the Lord had given deliverance unto Syria : he was also a mighty man in valour, but he was a leper." The words which describe the judgment on Gehazi for his cunning and dis- honesty, "And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow," are as well known as any in the Bible. The white leprosy of the Bible (a skin disease), we hasten to admit, was not leprosy proper, but by the general reader it has always been taken to he the same disease, and both diseases afflicted the world simultaneously.
Sir George Turner, in devoting himself to the study of leprosy, chose one of the most baffling diseases in the history of pathology. Following up the work of Koch, he had already discovered a serum and virus with which he twice stamped out rinderpest in South Africa. This was a result ultimately due to experiments on animals. It saved millions of pounds to South Africa and a great deal of suffering to animals. But the cure was simple by comparison with the treatment of
leprosy. Leprosy is unknown in the lower animals, and has never been artificially produced in them. While Dr. Turner was still engaged in fighting rinderpest, he laid on himself the voluntary obligation of helping the lepers at Pretoria. The Times says:— " There was then a leper asylum at Pretoria with about fifty Dutch and forty native patients. He gave up all his spare 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 this work without extra pay of any sort. He saw the lepers early in the morning, and again when he came home in the evening. Saturday and Sunday he gave to them entire. In addition to this he made as many post-mortem examinations as possible in his laboratory, rising at dawn in order to have time for the work. The asylum contains a large number of lepers, European as well as native, and a visitor who watched Dr. Turner moving amongst them in the asylum bears witness to the passionate devotion with which he was regarded by all its inmates."
Dr. Turner also ministered to the lepers in the Robben Island Asylum. When he returned to England, having
reached the age limit in the South African Civil Service, he settled down to the study of leprosy. About two years ago, one morning when he was shaving, he noticed a white mark on his band. "It was the stamp of the disease he had set himself to fight." For years the contagion had lain dormant. Paralysis has already deprived Sir George Turner
of the use of his left arm. But his spirit is undaunted. According to a statement in the Daily News, he is determined
to spend the rest of his life among lepers, either in the East or in South Africa.
What shall one hope for him more than that which he would most enthusiastically desire himself—that he may achieve the crown of his sacrifice and discover a cure for leprosy and answer some of the enigmas of the disease ? Why should the Dutch and the native races of South Africa be more liable to leprosy than Englishmen? It is not as though Englishmen had always been comparatively immune. Leprosy was a medieval scourge in England. Till nearly the begin- ning of the sixteenth century leper houses were being built. In Norway it does not die out very quickly ; in South Africa it has greatly increased. Throughout Asia and Africa it is an ever-present horror. The appeal of the leprous in India to-day is as poignant as in ancient India. The need for the charm is
as bitter as in the Alharva Veda : "Expel the leprosy ; remove
from him the spots and ashy hue. Let thine own colour come to thee; drive far away the specks of white."
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