Anti-Leprosy

Leonard Wood, exceedingly feeble and emaciated, thoroughly ill, in Manhattan last week ignored himself as usual and spoke, not as the Governor General of the Philippine Islands, not as the retired major general of the U. S. Army, but as the doctor of medicine that he also is. He was graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1884. An interne in a hospital where internes were forbidden to perform operations, he successfully operated on a child in an emergency and was dismissed for infraction of rules. He joined the Army as an assistant surgeon (1886). He served as medical and line officer with Captain Henry Ware Lawton in the great campaign of 1886 against the Apache Indians. For that service Congress in 1898 gave him its Congressional Medal of Honor.

Dr. Leonard Wood was the personal Surgeon of President William McKinley and became the close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy in President McKinley's cabinet. With Civilian Roosevelt as lieutenant colonel, Dr. Wood as Colonel Wood organized the "Rough Riders" from prominent athletes of eastern universities, cowboys, rancheros and Indians, for service in the Spanish-American War. Dr. Wood's talk last week was in advocacy of a $2,000,000 fund now being quietly collected in the U. S. to alleviate, study and prevent leprosy. Chief experiments will be conducted on the Philippines pest island of Culion, where Dr. H. Windsor Wade has charge of 5,200 lepers. At one time Culion was called the Island of Despair. Now it is the Island of Hope, for Dr. Wood has been able, by a rigid regime of treatment, to discharge approximately 1,000 onetime lepers as cured or at least noninfectious.

Of this Leonard Wood said in Manhattan last week: "It has been proved that cures are possible at nearly any stage of the disease, and more likely if treatment is started quickly. I do not think $2,000,000 is too large an amount to be raised by this drive when you consider that lepers are the most wretched of human beings." Advocating this was one of his main reasons for his present visit to the U. S. He plans to resume his duties as Governor General of the Philippines in September.