Word: leprosarium
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...wasn't until she had set up a leprosarium outside Calcutta on land provided by the government that I began to see her as an idealist rather than an eccentric. Lepers were a common sight all over India and in every part of Calcutta, but extending help beyond dropping a coin or two into their rag-wrapped stumps was not. As a child I was convinced even touching a spot a leper had rubbed against would lead to infection. The ultimate terror the city held had nothing to do with violence. It was fear of the Other, the poor...
...time until 1973. The Calcutta I went back to was vociferously in love with Mother Teresa. The women I had been close to in Loreto House, women who in the '70s had become socialite wives and volunteer social workers, were devoted to Mother Teresa and her projects, especially the leprosarium. Years later, I learned that the volunteer Mother Teresa came to rely on was a Loreto House graduate...
Graham Greene's architect Querry had to trek to an African leprosarium to find a metaphor adequate to express his mood; nothing less would be sufficiently wasted, blighted, defunct. Querry was, Greene meant, A Burnt-Out Case, like the leper Deo Gratias, his soul far gone. He was a masterpiece of acedia, a skull full of ashes, a rhapsodist of his own desolation...
...decree this summer citing "the heroic virtues" of Father Damien, the first step on the road toward sainthood for the Belgian-born missionary. Famed for his devotion to victims of leprosy in Hawaii, Father Damien followed a calling that led to his death from the disease. Now the leprosarium that he made famous, Kalaupapa, is dying of attrition-and for the most welcome reasons: new cases of the disease have become rare among ethnic Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians, and leprosy can be treated so successfully today that newly identified patients soon become noncontagious. The savage isolationism of the past...
...disease can have an incubation period of ten or more years and the priest might have been previously exposed to contagious patients. Other than Damien, no one serving leprosy patients at Kalaupapa has ever developed a confirmed case of the disease. Neither has anyone at the other principal US leprosarium at Carville...