Ruth Pfau: The physician and nun who fought tirelessly to drive leprosy into submission

She was so distressed by the suffering she saw in Pakistan that she couldn’t bring herself to leave

Emily Langer
Thursday 24 August 2017 12:09 BST
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‘I could not believe that humans could live in such conditions,’ the doctor once said
‘I could not believe that humans could live in such conditions,’ the doctor once said

Dr Ruth Pfau, who led a moral and medical campaign to help curb one of the most stigmatised diseases in human history, died on 10 August in Karachi. Like Mother Teresa, the ethnic Albanian nun who became known as “the saint of the gutters” for her service to the destitute of India, she had lived among the people she cared for and by a vow of poverty.

In 1960, as a young physician and nun, she had planned to begin her missionary work not in Pakistan but in India. Waylaid in Karachi with visa difficulties, she visited a leprosy colony and was so distressed by what she saw that she could not bring herself to leave.

The facility was overrun by rats and soiled by sewage. Speaking to the BBC in 2010, she recalled watching a young man as he “crawled on hands and feet into this dispensary, acting as if this was quite normal, as if someone has to crawl there through that slime and dirt on hands and feet, like a dog.” And in 2014, she told The Express Tribune: “I could not believe that humans could live in such conditions. That one visit, the sights I saw during it, made me make a key life decision.”

Under Pfau’s leadership, that facility became the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre, the nerve centre of a national network of medical professionals who sought to house, treat and at times rescue victims of the disease. (Pfau recalled collecting children who had been stowed away in caves or in cattle pens because of their illness.) With support from German donors, she and her colleagues managed to drive leprosy largely into submission. Since 1996, the World Health Organisation has considered the disease controlled in Pakistan. Her organisation later worked on the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis and blindness, as well as serving victims of drought, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters.

Ruth Katharina Martha Pfau was born on 9 September 1929, in Leipzig, where her family’s home was destroyed in the bombings of the Second World War. “If I give any sense to these years, it is a preparation to be ready to help others,” she told the BBC. After the war, with Leipzig under Soviet occupation, she fled from East to West Germany to pursue her medical training.

Pfau studied medicine at universities in Mainz and Marburg before joining the Catholic order of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary – the organisation that sent her abroad as a missionary – and claimed she nearly married a fellow student before experiencing what she described as a calling from God. “When you receive such a calling, you cannot turn it down, for it is not you who has made the choice,” she told The Express Tribune. “God has chosen you for Himself.”

For a period, Pfau served as an adviser to the Pakistani health minister. “We are like a Pakistani marriage,” she remarked. “It was an arranged marriage because it was necessary. We always and only fought with each other. But we never could go in for divorce because we had too many children.

Dr Ruth Pfau, physician and nun: born 9 September 1929; died 10 August 2017

© Washington Post

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