Lepers in Every Age

Mr. Simeon Peterson (aka "Mr. Pete" 86) sits in the physical therapy room at the National Hansen's Disease Center in Baton Rouge. Mr. Peterson was relocated to the leprosy camp in Carville, LA from his native US Virgin Islands in 1951. He is one of the last living residents of the leprosy center.

On Thanksgiving Sunday we listened to a gospel lesson about the ten lepers who are healed by Jesus (kinda) and the one who came back to say thank you. I made a passing comment about leprosy being the Ebola virus of ancient times. Well, not so ancient. All through the Middle Ages leprosy was feared in Europe. And not so many years ago we would hear regular appeals of support for the Leprosy Mission. That organization still exists and does important work. http://effecthope.org/learn/leprosy/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=information_canada_search_&utm_content=Leprosy_Mission_CanadaCuring_Leprosy_1_Child_At_A_Time&gclid=CjwKEAiAj-KiBRC48YzhnLSg0D0SJAClOhK3rQwT0Uqpb-KQ_ycaBcCqDP2sxsyFsPyfJI3_5OgP1hoCPy_w_wcB

Yesterday I came upon an article about a leprosy camp that was set up in Louisiana in the late 19th century. It is a reminder of how fear can motivate people to do cruel things and how faith can be the antidote. Here is an excerpt:

In 1894, two decades after Gerhard Armauer Hansen first identified the bacterium responsible for leprosy, five men and two women were taken from a New Orleans “pest house” to an abandoned sugarcane plantation about 130 kilometres up the Mississippi River. Barred by law from using public transportation, they were hauled instead by coal barge. The trip took 12 hours.
For two years, the first seven patients of the Louisiana Leper Home were left to fend for themselves in the ruins of a plantation house and a few slave shacks. It wasn’t until 1896 that a group of Catholic sisters, believing it to be a sacred duty, came to care for the sick.
What the sisters – and every health worker who came here since – would have quickly learned is that most of the public reputation of leprosy is apocryphal. The disease is not highly contagious; in fact, 95 per cent of the population is believed to be immune. Not a single health worker at Carville ever contracted the disease.

Even though we are supposedly more sophisticated in this modern, medically advanced age, fear is primal. A lot of stupid things are being said and done out of fear of Ebola. We know that people of faith are among those responding to the virus in West Africa and elsewhere. Thank God for their courage and the love of Christ which overcomes fear.

Can we learn from the mistakes of the past with illnesses such as leprosy and AIDS? Let's hope so.