Probably not one remained of the Bishop Home girls who had wrung our souls with their plaintive singing; but for Mother Marianne, wraith-like in her frail transparency, with blessings in her blue-veined hands and old eyes that seemed to look through and beyond us, we endured, as in the past, a concert. And it was no easier for them and for us than it had been for us and those who had gone before. Again were the tender things more sorrowful for my unconcealable grief than for their own.
But facts are facts, and joyous ones must overbalance the sorrowful. By stern and sterner segregation, as was done in Europe, leprosy is slowly being stamped out of the Hawaiian Islands. Eight years before, on Molokai, there were nearly a thousand lepers, and the Noeau made four yearly trips to carry the apprehended victims of the Territory; now there are a trifle over six hundred, and but one human cargo in the twelve months disembarks at Kalaupapa. This diminution of roughly thirty per cent of patients led Jack to prognosticate that fifty years hence the good rich acres of the Molokai Peninsula will be clean farmland for the clean, and moreover an accessible and unparalleled scenic wonder for the travelers of the world.
“I am happier about this place than I ever hoped to be,” he imparted to me. “Oh, don’t think for a moment that I minimize the dreadfulness of leprosy. But I am certain now of the passing of it, if the Islands persist in this rigid segregation.”
Jack ever stood reverent before the beyond-price work of Dr. Will Goodhue toward freeing the inhabitants of the Settlement from their thrall. Let me quote from his article, requested by the Advertiser upon our return to Honolulu:
“I insist that I must take my hat off in salute to two great, courageous, noble men: Jack McVeigh ... and Dr. Will Goodhue... My pride is to say that I have had the vast good fortune to know two such men. McVeigh, sitting tight on the purse-strings of the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year appropriated by the Territory, sitting up nights as well, begging money from his friends to do additional things for the Settlement over and beyond what the Territory finds itself able to-day to appropriate, is the one man in the Territory to-day who could not be replaced by any other man in his job. Dr. Goodhue, the pioneer of leprosy surgery, is a hero who should receive every medal that every individual and every country has ever awarded for courage and life-saving... I know of no other place, lazar house or settlement, in the world, where the surgical work is being performed that Dr. Goodhue performs daily... I have seen him take a patient, who, in any other settlement or lazar house in the world, would from the complications of the disease die horribly in a week, or two weeks or three ... and give it life, not for weeks, not for months, but for years and years, to the rounded ripeness of three score and ten, and give to it thereby the sun, the ever changing beauty of the Pali, the eternal wine of wind of the northeast trades, the body-comfort, the brain-quickness, the love of man and woman—in short, all the bribes and compensations of existence.”
But that is not all. Jack London’s hopeful prophecy did not take into account the discovery of a positive cure for leprosy. Alas, that he could not have read with me the glad, almost incredible tidings that meet my eyes in newspaper and periodical. The latest is a quotation from the lips of Dr. William J. Goodhue himself, speaking to members of the legislature visiting Kalaupapa in 1921. Said he:
“With two years’ chaulmoogra oil treatment, I believe sixty-five per cent of the chronic cases of leprosy on Molokai can be cured.” And within ten years, he added, all cases should be cured, and Kalaupapa be abandoned as a leper settlement. That same day, Dr. F. E. Trotter, president of the territorial board of health, announced to the lepers assembled in their amusement hall, that within a period of two years probably not twenty-five of their number would be compelled to stay on Molokai.
The feelings of those in the audience undoubtedly varied. To the majority, the hope held out for a return to the outside world must have been received with solemn thanksgiving; but there were some, I am sure, who, suffering little, have been happy in the harmoniousness of life on the peninsula, and who look with dismay upon being torn from its care and kindness.
The astounding revelation, after many centuries, is based upon results obtained at Kalihi, under Dr. J. T. McDonald, Director Leprosy Investigation Station, from the use of chaulmoogra oil. The history is brief. In 1918, the distinguished chemist, Dr. Arthur L. Dean, president of the University of Hawaii, and head of its chemistry department, was asked by the United States Public Health Service to add to the college research work some scientific problems in relation to chaulmoogra oil, which had enjoyed a good reputation with experimenters in different parts of the world. Chaulmoogra, according to my Standard Dictionary, is an East-Indian tree (Gynocardia odorata) of the Indian plum family, with a succulent fruit yielding a fixed oil.
It seems that the ethyl esters of the fatty acids of the oil had been reported by observers elsewhere to be ineffective on leprosy. Dr. Dean, however, succeeded in producing a form of that derivative of the oil, which in its curative effects on the patients of Kalihi Hospital has surpassed, so far as known, anything ever attained in the line of leprosy therapy.