How illness teaches empathy.

Recently at a social event an acquaintance I was speaking with asked, “Isn’t it hard being a doctor? People just continually bringing you their problems?” Every once in a while, purely by chance, I read something so wonderful that I feel the need to share it. Such is an essay in a recent issue of Harper’s by the San Francisco–based American writer Rebecca Solnit. The essay is entitled “The Separating Sickness. How Leprosy Teaches Empathy.”1 Ms Solnit lures us in with an opening story of Eddie Bacon, a forklift operator from Alaska whose mysterious rashes, weakness, and weight loss confounded local doctors, but eventually led to a diagnosis of leprosy and a visit to the United States’ largest leprosy clinic in Baton Rouge, La, for treatment.1 The opening story surprises us with its juxtaposition of a case of leprosy in Alaska, as the disease is often thought of as afflicting those in more tropical climates, and the nation’s pre-eminent treatment centre housed in just such a warmer climate. In fact, in 2008 the number of new cases worldwide was 249 007—Brazil, India, and Indonesia accounted for 77% of cases reported to the World Health Organization.2 In total, 109 cases in the United States were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2007.2 But the story is more complex and interesting than that. Solnit tells us the often fascinating, sad, but also uplifting story of the Louisiana Leper Home, which was founded in Carville, La, in 1894 and moved to nearby Baton Rouge in 1999, where it is now known as the National Hansen’s Disease Clinical Center (today leprosy is known as Hansen disease, named after the Norwegian physician Gerhard Hansen who discovered its cause, Mycobacterium leprae, in the 1870s).3 Her essay begins as a history of a disease and an institution and ends with a meditation on the nature of empathy. Along the way we learn that,