The Leper

He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my jamiliar friends have forgotten me . . . I am an alien in their sight. I called my servant, and he gave me no answer; I intreated him with my mouth. My breath is strange to my wife . . .

--Job IQ:13-17

All but the last of these complaints came last week, with passionate and justified indignation, from Marcello Orano, 56, once a successful author and one of Italy's popular heroes, now with no claim to fame save as Europe's best known and worst treated leper. One of a family prominent in education and government, Orano was a dashing cavalier who served as a colonial official in Africa, wrote novels (three of them made into prewar movies), had a bewildering succession of marital relationships, and once turned Moslem.

Bombs & Bacilli. It was in 1941 that Orano contracted the disease that made him a pariah. Italian troops and officials in Somaliland had run from the British, but Orano persisted in taking a boatload of supplies to hungry leprosy victims in a remote colony. Caught in an air attack along the way. he suffered some 50 superficial wounds from bomb fragments. Ashore, he helped bandage wounded leprosy patients, and the disease-causing Hansen's bacilli entered his own wounds.

Not until 1949 was his leprosy diagnosed. Then the police, rigidly following Italy's medievally strict leprosy laws, threw him into Rome's Lazzaretto Lazaro Spallanzani.* Though he was repeatedly certified "noncontagious and innocuous," it took Orano months to get away to France with his wife Giulia, a former nurse. But after six years of campaigning against the "vilest humiliations" and "unreasoning, medieval terror of leprosy," Orano was finally locked up by the French. So back he went to Rome.

There, an international congress had just proclaimed: "Leprosy is a disease of low contagiousness and amenable to treatment . . . All discriminatory laws should be abolished. Measures should be taken to promote public understanding of the true nature of leprosy and to remove all prejudices and superstitions associated with the disease."

Decay & Disorder. In a flurry of understanding, Rome gave Orano a hero's welcome, with gifts of a TV set. books and money, and promises of special consideration in the Lazzaretto Spallanzani. (Despite intensive treatment in France with sulfone drugs, the once powerful Orano was by this time gnarled and weakened, his handsome face disfigured, his blue eyes clouded.) But the promises were soon forgotten. Roman bureaucrats enforced the letter of antiquated Italian law. They let the faithful Giulia live with him in an isolated cottage (he is the only leprosy victim in Spallanzani), forced her to take full care of him, gave him little treatment. Once he broke out to make a placarded public protest--in vain. Again his "acquaintance are verily estranged" from him. The few who try to visit him are kept out by the Ministry of Health's pettifogging rules.

Last week, breaking under the strain, Giulia Orano begged the Roman press to help rescue her and her husband from "terror and desperation . . . decay, disorder and dirt." Only the Communist L'Unitd gave her space and grudging, lukewarm support. In all of Italy there are 300 leprosy victims confined and under treatment, but an estimated 2,000 are hiding out (and therefore going untreated) because they fear a fate like Orano's.

No move has been made to change Italian law in line with the ringing declaration of the 1956 congress. And that congress recommended dropping the word "leper" because of its incrustation of moral connotations, substituting "leprosy victim" or "leprosy patient." But Italian officialdom has changed in neither word nor deed: Marcello Orano, hero of 1941, is in 1959 nothing but a leper.

* Lazzaretto, from Lazarus, an isolation hospital; named for Microbe Hunter Lazaro Spallanzani (1729-99).

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