Word: damien
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Omen is a soulless, gutless endeavor, an ultra-gory, workmanlike tale about the arrival of the anti-Christ, one Damien. (Every movie about the devil must have its "Damien"). Every ten minutes someone gets impaled, chucked out a window, or decapitated, the latter by a plate-glass window in a scene lingered over by the cameraman as though he were some kind of vampire. One moment of imagination: the prowl of a vicious wolf-dog from hell whose breathing is synchronized with one of Jerry Goldsmith's Latin chants. Gregory Peck is well-meaning, but as animated as a potted...
Pope Paul VI approved a decree this summer citing "the heroic virtues" of Father Damien, the first step on the road toward sainthood for the Belgian-born missionary. Famed for his devotion to victims of leprosy in Hawaii, Father Damien followed a calling that led to his death from the disease. Now the leprosarium that he made famous, Kalaupapa, is dying of attrition-and for the most welcome reasons: new cases of the disease have become rare among ethnic Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians, and leprosy can be treated so successfully today that newly identified patients soon become noncontagious. The savage...
...beds were filled by patients who were very sick, not only from active leprosy and its complications but also from tuberculosis and kidney diseases. But even at that time, she said, there had been, naturally, a vast improvement in conditions and in nursing and medical care over what Father Damien had found when he landed in the colony...
...royal government provided no housing materials and no food beyond a few rangy cattle. Patients had to tote water from a spring a mile away. The arrival of Father Joseph Damien de Veuster changed all that. He inspired and encouraged the colonists to build better houses and a primitive hospital on the sheltered side of the peninsula and to install a mile-long water line. How and where or when Damien contracted leprosy, which caused his death in 1889, can never be known. The disease can have an incubation period of ten or more years and the priest might have...
Ironically, Damien's fame and the cause of his death have stood in the way of public awareness that for most ethnic groups, leprosy is one of the least contagious of all diseases. Koch estimates that 90%, perhaps even as many as 99% of Caucasians could not catch leprosy if they tried-not even by living in marital contact with a patient for many years...