I spent a month this spring with Dr. Paul Brand, the missionary surgeon and leprosy specialist with whom I am collaborating on our third book. We visited the key places in India and England that have shaped his life.
In India we were welcomed like visiting royalty. As we approached Brand’s boyhood home, a throng of people rushed down the hillside to meet our vehicle. Women in brightly colored saris draped floral leis around our necks and led us to a feast spread on banana leaves. After the meal 100 people gathered in the chapel (hand built by Brand’s father) and treated us to an hour-long program of hymns, tributes, and ceremonial dances.
A Healer Of Souls
Our reception in individual homes made an even deeper impression on me. One man, Namo, had a 20-year-old photo of Brand on his wall, captioned, “May the Spirit that is in him live in me.” When Namo told me his story, I could easily understand the affection he feels for his former surgeon.
During his final year at the university, Namo had to drop out; telltale patches of leprosy had appeared on his skin, and his hand was retracting into a rigid claw position. Rejected by his school, his village, and finally his family, Namo made his way to a leprosarium in southern India where a young doctor was trying out some experimental hand-surgery techniques. There were three million people with leprosy in India, but Brand was the first orthopedic surgeon to treat them.
Namo recalled that dark day: “I was so angry at my condition I could hardly speak. Stuttering, I told Dr. Brand my hands were now useless to me, and soon my feet would be too. He could operate on them as he wanted. Perhaps he might learn something that would benefit others.”
Fortunately, Namo was wrong about his prognosis. Drugs halted the spread of the disease. And after undergoing a series of surgical procedures that stretched out over five years, he regained the use of his hands and feet. He took training in physiotherapy, began working with other leprosy patients, and went on to become Chief of Physical Therapy at the All-India Institute.
That same day I visited Sadan, another of Brand’s former patients. He looked like a miniature version of Gandhi: skinny, balding, perched cross-legged on the edge of a bed. He now lives in his own home and has a wife and a good job. But in a high-pitched, singsong voice he told me wrenching stories of past rejection: the classmates who made fun of him in school, the driver who kicked him—literally, with his shoe—off a public bus, the many employers who refused to hire him, the hospitals that turned him away.
“I can still remember when Dr. Brand took my infected, ulcerated feet in his hands,” said Sadan. “I had been to many doctors over the years. A few had examined my hands and feet from a distance, but Dr. Brand and his wife were the first medical workers who dared to touch me.”
Sadan then recounted the elaborate medical procedures—tendon transfers, nerve strippings, toe amputations, and cataract removal—performed by Brand and his wife (an ophthalmologist). His past life was a catalogue of suffering. But as we sipped our last cup of tea, just before leaving to catch a plane to England, Sadan made this astonishing statement: “Still, I must say that I am now happy that I had this disease. Apart from leprosy, I would have been a normal man with a normal family, chasing wealth and a higher position in society. I would never have known such wonderful people as Dr. Paul and Dr. Margaret, and I would never have known the God who lives in them.”
Lasting Rewards
Our reception in England made for a striking contrast. There, too, Brand and I retraced the steps of his past, visiting the ancestral home where his missionary parents had spent their furloughs; standing on the hospital roof where as a medical resident he had fire watched during the Blitz; touring the Royal College of Surgeons where he had delivered two prestigious Hunterian lectures. But no one garlanded us with leis, and no one gathered around us singing hymns.
In the setting of his early medical adventures, Brand seemed, if anything, an anachronism. We wandered from receptionist to receptionist at University College Hospital inquiring after former faculty colleagues. “Who? Could you spell that name?” was the typical response. Finally, in a darkened hallway, we found a row of photos of some of Brand’s teachers—doctors who were as famous in their day as Christian Barnard or C. Everett Koop are in ours.
I caught myself wondering how Paul Brand’s career might have flourished had he stayed in London. Even working in a remote Indian village among outcast leprosy patients, he had achieved a measure of renown: an Albert Lasker award, a chapter in most manuals of hand surgery, a Commander of the British Empire medal from the queen, several surgical procedures named after him. If he had stayed in a research capacity at a well-equipped laboratory, who knows what honors might have come his way. A Nobel Prize, perhaps?
But what then? His picture would join the others in the darkened hallway, now dusty and beginning to yellow. His name, like theirs, would appear as a footnote in the medical textbooks. But fame in the annals of medicine rarely lasts long; microsurgery techniques have already outdated most of the procedures considered breakthroughs in Brand’s youth. In contrast, his “sacrificial” work as a missionary surgeon in India continues to bear fruit, in the transformed lives of Namo and Sadan and hundreds like them.
Coming so close together, the encounters in India and England became for me a kind of parable that contrasted the fleetingness of fame with the permanence of investing in service to others. Whether we live out our days in India, England, or Clarkston, Georgia, the true measure of our worth will depend not on a résumé or income, but on the spirit we pass on to others.
“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,” said Jesus in his proverb most often repeated in the Gospels. Each career path offers its own rewards. But after sitting with Brand in the homes of Namo and Sadan, and then touring the Hall of Fame at the Royal College of Surgeons, there was not a doubt in my mind about which rewards truly last.
