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.

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    GENERAL REMARKS. 4 THE ordinary clinical aspects of leprosy are too well known to require notice here. It will be sufficient to state that in India, as in other parts of the world, three forms of leprosy are met with, the tuberculated, the anaesthetic, and the mixed. In the first the skin is primarily invaded by the leprous growth, afterwards the mucous membranes and viscera. In the second form the lesions occur chiefly in the peripheral nerves, while the third is simply a combination of the other two forms. It has been suggested by some observers that tuberculated and anaesthetic leprosy are distinct diseases. That they are one and the same may be inferred from the fact that tubercu- lated leprosy is nearly always associated in its later course with anaesthesia, thus giving rise to mixed leprosy, and also from the fact that the same bacillus is found in the two forms. Fur- ther, Gerlach1 has shown by a series of elaborate dissections in a case of anaesthetic leprosy, that the primary growth takes place in the skin around the peripheral ends of the nerves, ex- tending afterwards up the branches to the main trunks. The onset of the disease would thus appear to be the same in each variety. The following table shows the number of cases and the percentage of each form of leprosy observed by the Commission in the various places visited. These figures agree very nearly with those worked out by Vandyke Carter for Bombay. (*) (*) Untersuchungen uber die Unabhangigkeit der Bildung anasthetischer Haut- flecke von der Erkrankung zus-elioriger Nerven bei der Lepra anasthetica Dorpat, 1890.