The Leper Spy by Ben Montgomery Read Free Book Online Page B

following afternoon, outside the east portal to Malinta Tunnel, Manuel Quezon was sworn in as the first president of the new Philippine Commonwealth. In his short inaugural address, he spoke of air raids and of bombs falling on women and children and of Japan’s superiority on air, land, and sea. Then he called for unity in the new fight.
    â€œTo all Americans in the Philippines, soldiers and civilians alike, I want to say that our common ordeal has fused our hearts in a single purpose and an everlasting affection,” he said. “My fellowcountrymen, this is the most momentous period of our history. As we face the grim realities of war, let us rededicate ourselves to the great principles of freedom and democracy for which our forefathers fought and died. The present war is being fought for these same principles.”
    Following the ceremony, the Ninety-First Coast Artillery Band was to play the national anthems of the United States and the Philippines, but their barracks had been bombed and their instruments were burned.

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VOLUNTEER
    H er body was failing, and she was scared. So little was known about her affliction, and the void was filled with terror.
    Though her husband’s main interest was infectious diseases, he knew far more about tuberculosis, which caused some thirty thousand deaths a year in the islands, than leprosy.
Mycobacterium leprae
was among the first bacilli identified, back in 1873, but it remained a medical mystery. It wasn’t part of the standard medical school curriculum, and few physicians bothered to learn about it. There was no vaccine for leprosy, and no one could say for sure whether it was hereditary or a contagious disease. It was commonly believed that you got leprosy by sharing food or drink with a leper or by touching an infected person.
    In the Philippines, leprosy sufferers hid the early symptoms under clothing as long as possible, until it was no longer an option. When the lesions couldn’t be covered, victims were ejected from their communities, becoming charity cases, outcasts, or beggars, forced to leave behind their lives, their jobs, their loved ones. Because of unfortunate wording in the Old Testament, leprosy was regarded in some cultures as a punishment for sinfulness, transforming sufferers’ physical ailments into a moral condition. Stigmatized, they were driven into hellish government- or church-run colonies in the rural provinces, away from society.
    There were some eight thousand known cases in the islands at the start of the war, but the chaos of battle had sent many more into hiding for fear they’d become the easiest casualties of the new occupying regime. This was not an irrational fear. In 1912, soldiers in a city in southern China rounded up lepers in their own colony, drove them to a pit, and shot them, women and children included. And then they burned the bodies. Fifty-three people died that day, and the massacre was met with public approval. More recently, in 1937, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, leprosy victims were promised an allowance of ten cents—a ruse—and when they gathered to accept the allotment, more than fifty of them were executed.
    The American health authorities in the Pacific Islands adopted a policy of segregation and isolation, shipping the afflicted to far-flung colonies or medical facilities for treatment with an injectable form of chaulmoogra oil, the only drug that showed any promise. With the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States, those who weren’t caught and dispatched to leper colonies were now stuck in cities with shuttered pharmacies.
    Joey desperately needed medicine to keep her disease under control, but it was virtually impossible to get in the shredded city. Sometimes the drugs could be found on the black market, but the expense was so high, out of reach. So the leprosy ran rampant, attacking her body, destroying her flesh, and causing her joints to stiffen.
    She