The Bhau Daji treatment of leprosy / by Stanley Boyd.

  • Boyd, James Stanley Newton, 1856-1916.
Date:
[1893]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Bhau Daji treatment of leprosy / by Stanley Boyd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Rqpritited from the Bkitish Journal of Dermatology, No. 57, Vol. 5.] THE BHAU DAJI TREATMENT OF By STANLEY BOYD, M.B., F.E.C.Sj Surgeon to Charing Cross Hospital. The above title will probably convey little meaning even to derma- tologists, yet it will be understood by all who were practising in the Bombay Presidency between the years 1868 and 1872. Mr. Bhau Daji was a graduate of the Grant Medical College, Bombay. I am informed that one of his teachers, the well-known Dr. C. Morehead, suggested to him that he should study the treatment of leprosy. Accordingly Bhau Daji began a series of careful observations upon the various remedies which had a reputation among the natives for the relief of leprosy. He commenced work upon the subject before 1859, when Dr. Morehead left India, and, in 1862, I find a note of his having stated to Dr. Duff, of Calcutta, that he was trying a remedy in his charitable dispensary at Bombay which offered a hope even for lepers. About 1868 letters from people who believed that they had been cured of leprosy by Bhau Daji began to appear in the Indian news- papers, and occasional articles in the Times of India show that there was a good deal of acrimonious discussion going on upon the subject of these cures, and upon the propriety of Bhau Daji's action in keeping secret his method of treatment. Naturally medical men were very sceptical as to the reality of the cures, and the Lancet, 1868, vol. ii., p. 238—in the same volume which recorded Dr. Bake- well's report upon Beauperthuy's cases—stated that, among the seventy cases of relief or cure with which the Bhau Daji treatment was at that time credited, not one cure had been fairly proved, and