Leprosy in India : report of the Leprosy Commission in India, 1890-91.

Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Leprosy in India : report of the Leprosy Commission in India, 1890-91. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    13/542
    Memorandum on the Report of the Leprosy Commissioners, as prepared by a Special Committee, appointed for the purpose, and endorsed or annotated by Members of the Executive Committee. Your Committee, having been instructed to consider and report to you upon the publication of the Report of the Leprosy Commissioners in India in 1890-1, beg to submit the following considerations :— I. They desire to place on record their sense of the ability with which the Commissioners con- ducted their investigations while in India, and of the comprehensive and valuable nature of their report. II. The conclusions at which the Commissioners arrived have been summarised by them at the end of their report as follows—the evidence upon which these conclusions rest being dis- played at length in the earlier pages of the Report:— “(1) Leprosy is a disease sui ge?ieris; it is not a form of syphilis or tuberculosis, but has striking ^etiological analogies with the latter.” “ (2) Leprosy is not diffused by hereditary trans- mission (9, and for this reason, and the established amount of sterility among lepers, the disease has a natural tendency to die out.” “ (3) Though in a scientific classification of diseases leprosy must be regarded as contagious and also inoculable (2), yet the extent to which it is propa- gated by these means is exceedingly small.”