Four Years in Upper Burma by W.R. Winston — Read

One of the painful sights which specially attracts the notice of the European in Burma is the large number of lepers to be seen in all the public places. As you walk along the streets you see them, sitting in the dust, holding out their mutilated limbs, from which sometimes all traces of hands and feet have ulcerated away. If you go into the great bazaar, they are seen mingling with the crowds of buyers and sellers. If you go to the great pagodas, where hundreds of people congregate daily, there are lepers sitting on the steps, and appealing to the generosity of the worshippers. At the gates of the royal city, and in the public _zayats_ or resting places, they are to be found; and when the leper has dragged about his poor diseased body as long as he is able, he lies down to die, a friendless, homeless outcast. In Burma, until we took the matter up, there was no organised relief for them beyond chance coppers, no place of refuge where they could be housed and provided for.

Seeing the lepers were so numerous, I began to investigate the matter, and as a preliminary measure looked up the statistics of the leper population of Burma. There had then been no census in Upper Burma, but according to the census of 1881, there were upwards of 2,500 returned as lepers in Lower Burma. Large as that number is, it is to be feared that it does not fully represent the evil, for the people naturally object to being called lepers even if they are, as though by avoiding the name they could hope to avoid the awful thing. I have known a leper, so far advanced as to have lost the whole of both his hands, and quite emaciated in body, declare in answer to my question, that it was not leprosy, only "Koh-ma-koung-bu," a bad state of body. To form a fair estimate of the actual number of lepers in Burma, we should have to make a considerable addition to the 2,500 returned for Lower Burma, and multiply that by two, to take in both Upper and Lower Burma. It is probably not too much to say that there will be about one leper to every thousand of the population.