Medicine: Blued Lepers, Pig Banks

To 80,000 healthy Christians who own pig savings banks and to 3,000,000 leprous individuals scattered throughout the world, the annual meeting of the American Mission to Lepers last week in the cozy Church House of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church was a momentous occurrence. At that meeting Dr. Victor George Heiser, Far East director of the Rockefeller Foundation and president of the International Leprosy Association, dramatically announced that leprosy is apparently being cured. In the process the lepers are dyed blue by injection into their veins of a dye called trypan-blue.*

Trypan-blue has been used to kill the spindly, boring animalcules (trypanosomes) which cause sleeping sickness. It is also useful to kill the microbes of malaria. In the Federated Malay States, at the Sungei Buloh leper settlement Dr. Gordon A. Ryrie discovered that the blue trypan dye attacked the fatty bacilli present in leprosy and tuberculosis (the forms of the diseases are related). Other investigators confirmed Dr. Ryrie’s work, among them cautious Dr. Heiser.

“Within a few moments after the solution of trypan-blue, injected intravenously, enters the vein of a patient,” explained Dr. Heiser last week, “the surface lesions of leprosy become clearly outlined, much as if they were painted in blue on the skin. A few minutes later the entire body becomes blue. Within a week or two after this drug has been injected the hard and lumpy swellings of leprosy undergo softening. Shortly afterward they begin to absorb. In a large percentage of cases in a period of a few months all lesions of leprosy disappear. . . . The blue color disappears about six weeks after the last of six injections has been taken.”

Then, cautiously: “It is still too early to predict whether these apparent cures will be permanent. . . . It is well to remember that disappointments in the treatment of leprosy have been many.”

Contributors to the American Mission to Lepers, which now supports 184 leproseries, own toy pig banks in which they deposit their odd coins. The idea developed 20 years ago when Wilbur Chapman, Kansas farm boy, bought a piglet, named him Pete, raised him to pighood, gave his profit to Leper missions. Last week Mr. Chapman, now a St. Paul electrical engineer, visited Manhattan to permit a firm-willed patrician from Richmond, Va., Mrs. Robert Randolph Harrison, to pin a silver medal on him for his boyhood initiative. Mrs. Harrison during the ceremony wore a little gold pig on a brooch over her heart; she is the “Honorable First Pig Lady in America,” for ingeniously transforming Mr. Chapman’s pig-fund idea. Like 80,000 others who learned from her, she sends toy pig banks to her friends. Proudly she recalled last week: “I started with six little pigs, and in the first year raised $45. Now in Richmond I am able to raise in good years $2,000 through 400 pigs I have out. . . .”

* Also called Niagara blue, Congo blue, Diamine blue. It is, in chemical terminology, sodium tolidin-disazo-bi-1-amido-8-naphthol-3.6-disulfonicacid.