Word: leper
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When, in 1873, an obscure young Belgian missionary priest named Father Damien begged the Catholic Prefect Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands to send him to a leper colony 50 miles away, the name of Molokai meant nothing to the outside world. Molokai is an island to which the Hawaiian Government had exiled all its lepers after a frightful outbreak of the disease, a lawless chaos whose 800 foul inhabitants lived a slow death in huts, with only one another's company and the sweet intoxicating juice of the ki tree for distraction. Father Damien changed that...
After eleven years at the Molokai leper colony, Father Damien one Sunday addressed his congregation not with his usual "Brethren," but "We lepers." During the next five years his face took on the leper's look, leonine, patchy, with fierce eyes and thick lips. In 1889 Father Damien died, aged 49. His people buried him in the churchyard...
...sacrificing successor, Brother Joseph Dutton (TIME, April 6, 1931). Brother Joseph died at 87, untouched by leprosy. Why, some wondered, did Father Damien contract it? Was he unclean? Soon after Father Damien died a Honolulu Presbyterian missionary named C. M. Hyde wrote a colleague that, among other things, the leper priest "was not a pure man in his relations with women." This statement, published in Australia, evoked from Presbyterian Robert Louis Stevenson a bitter rebuttal which may well be a deciding factor in the saintly cause of Father Damien. Stevenson had visited Molokai, had talked with Brother Joseph, had found...
...emergency hospital, got Publisher Hearst to send relief trains. Another time, disguised as a Salvation Army lass, she visited the "lowest dives" of the Barbary Coast, wrote a stirring series on vice. She covered the Thaw murder trial, interviewed everyone from Sir Henry Irving to President Harrison, visited the leper colony at Molokai. When Mr. Hearst's mother died in 1919, "Annie Laurie" wrote the official press obituary, later turned out a 54,000-word biography of Phoebe Apperson Hearst in twelve days...
Sophie was received at court, where she was as welcome as a leper. The revolution of 1830 placed Louis Philippe on the throne. Prince de Condé, still surrounded by Sophie's brawny cousins and lovers, tried to flee the country, was discovered by Sophie and subsequently strangled in his bed. An investigation, establishing Sophie's guilt, was suppressed by the king. Sophie had her wealth, her entrée into society, but she was hissed in the theatre, snubbed on all sides, while her scandal nearly overthrew the government. She developed into a monstrous, muscular, scowling...