Last month the Leonard Wood Memorial was glad to finance Leprologist Ernest Muir so that he might leave his headquarters in London for an evangelistic tour of U. S. medical centres where leprosy, the subject in which the Memorial is particularly interested, is studied. Dr. Muir, 56, spent 15 years as a medical missionary among Bengal lepers, another 15 years as a research worker in leprosy in Calcutta's School of Tropical Medicine. At present he is Medical Secretary of the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association. In the U. S., Dr. Muir addressed the American Society of Tropical Medicine during a convention in Baltimore, inspected the U. S. leprosarium at Carville, La. (356 inmates), looked over the researches in leprosy problems being conducted at Vanderbilt, George Washington. Western Reserve, Rochester and Harvard universities. Everywhere he found encouraging things to say.
Last week Dr. Muir sailed home for London. As he left Manhattan he deposited a draft of information about leprosy which his U. S. sponsors may cash at the bank of U. S. chanty to get funds for an increased attack on this ancient disease. "Tuberculosis is more infectious than leprosy," declared Dr. Muir. But leprosy is more amenable to treatment. Drugs arrest the progress of leprosy, but they do not cure. They are simply "useful adjuncts" to good food and plenty of vitamins. Just as useful as chaulmoogra oil, upon which hopes have risen high, is "any kind of counterirritant. Acids painted on the leper's body sometimes cause the cells to react, multiply, and eat up the bacilli."
"Leprosy will have disappeared before Science finds a cure for it," says Dr. Muir. All that is necessary to stamp it out is to prevent contagion by segregating lepers and removing children from leprous parents, see that the general population has enough to eat and keeps clean.