While wars bring pain and suffering, people like Dr Ruth Katharina Martha Pfau dwell in the hearts of people and remain a candle of hope to help others. To a BBC interviewer she once said, “If I give any sense to these years, it is a preparation to be ready to help others.”

On August 10, when she passed away at the age of 87, she left behind hundreds of people whose hearts she had touched. A recipient of Hilal-i-Imtiaz, the German Staufer medal, Nishan-i-Quaid-i-Azam, and Hilal-i-Pakistan, Dr Pfau received a state funeral at St Patrick’s Church in Saddar, Karachi in recognition of her selfless services to alleviate human suffering.

The more you read about Dr Pfau, champion of the cause of leprosy in Pakistan, the more the quote by Julius Caesar resounds — and I take the liberty to change the pronoun — “She came, She saw, She conquered.”

Remembering the iconic Dr Ruth Pfau — who passed away on August 10 — and her 50 years of devotion and dedication to eradicating leprosy in Pakistan

Of course, the connotations of the word ‘conquer’ are totally different for both personalities. While Julius Caesar conquered swathes of lands to build an empire on the dead bodies of multitudes, Dr Pfau conquered hearts by providing succour to patients of leprosy and saving humanity. Today, according to the World Health Organisation, Pakistan is the first country from Asia where leprosy remains a controlled disease since 1996. Dr Pfau’s efforts have made sure it remains so.

Indeed this is no small achievement and it is all thanks to the untiring efforts of Dr Pfau. She was on her way to India in the 1960s to begin her missionary work (she was a member of the Catholic Order of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary) and had taken a stopover in Karachi due to some visa issues. During her stay in Karachi she visited the so-called ‘leper’ colony on McLeod Road and decided to make Pakistan her final abode. Often dubbed the ‘Mother Teresa of Pakistan’, Dr Pfau chose to work in one of the most difficult areas of public health: the debilitating and disabling disease of leprosy.

In a BBC interview in 2010 Pfau described her visit to a leprosy patients’ isolation centre at McLeod Road (now I.I. Chundrigar Road). “I saw a young man crawl on hands and feet into this dispensary, acting as if this was quite normal, as if someone has to crawl there through that slime and dirt on hands and feet, like a dog.” She also spotted a rat eating away into the wound of a leprosy patient, while the patient remained numb.

Such disturbing sights changed Dr Pfau’s life forever. A short missionary work assignment became the purpose of her life — to pull these sufferers out of a life of indignity and shame, and give them hope through improved treatment and respect.

Perhaps she found it easier to understand the meaning of misery and pain. Born on September 9, 1929 in Leipzig, Germany, she experienced first-hand the horror of World War II and constant displacement due to endless bombardment. In many interviews given to the media, she mentioned how she shuddered during bombardment taking place in the area that she lived in. She remembered once waking up in the morning to see the neighbour’s house destroyed. Luckily enough her home, where she had hid during the night-long bombardment had remained untouched.

Once the war was over, and Leipzig was placed under Soviet occupation, Dr Pfau decided to flee to West Germany to pursue a career in medicine. She studied in medical universities in Marburg and Mainz and met a student whom, she writes in her autobiography, she planned to marry. It was then, she writes, that she experienced a calling from God.

“When you receive such a calling, you cannot turn it down, for it is not you who has made the choice,” she said in an interview to the media. “God has chosen you for Himself.”

One of her first uphill tasks to control leprosy was to re-organise the dispensary at the McLeod Road centre, and render “a full service leprosy treatment and rehabilitation centre, free to patients.” The website of the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre (MALC), of which Dr Pfau was the founder member, reports that as the news of the new initiatives spread, doctors and activists came forward to carry the mission forward. The rest is history.

When you receive such a calling, you cannot turn it down, for it is not you who has made the choice,” she said in an interview to the media. “God has chosen you for Himself.”

Another difficult task was to establish a leprosy centre in the heart of the city. With funds arranged from Germany, Dr Pfau established a small clinic in Saddar near the passport office. This wasn’t easy to do as it was met with criticism due to the stigma attached to leprosy. Over the years, the small clinic gradually turned into an eight-storey medical building to cater to a larger number of patients of leprosy.

Dr Pfau’s perseverance also resulted in convincing the Pakistani government to implement the National Leprosy Control Programme in 1963, which led to the opening of leprosy centres across the country. “Today, the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre is the hub of 157 leprosy control centres, with over 800 staff members,” reports their website.

She was happy that her efforts brought leprosy in control in the country, but she knew that this wasn’t the end of her journey of reducing human pain. In her last message on the MALC website, she said, “the shortage of trained and motivated manpower leaves us with the conviction that leprosy control is not the last calling. Especially as leprosy patients are suffering from disabilities which are not cured with simple anti-leprosy medication, and in the same area where they are living, hundreds of other patients are suffering from general disability as well…”

Dr Pfau felt the sufferer’s pain which became her driving force. What she found most disconcerting was the stigma attached to leprosy in our society which took away dignity from the sufferers. She believed that the cure is a process which not only treats the physical ailment but continues until the patient has been rehabilitated and has access to his right to food and clothing, shelter, education, health, equal job opportunities and, above all, social acceptance.

With the risk of relapse ever present, leprosy workers need to establish long-term associations with their patients who are monitored for early signs of any recurrence of the disease. Hence community development remained her focus right from the beginning and took healthcare right to the patients’ doorstep. This meant personally visiting families to discuss with them that leprosy is a grossly misunderstood disease and is treatable. That Dr Pfau was willing to go the extra mile simply shows how much passion she had for her patients. For her, they were her “children.”

As she put it once in a BBC interview where she talked about working as an adviser to the health minister in the government, “Our relationship was like an arranged marriage, because it was necessary to work with the health ministry,” she said. “But we always fought with each other and could not go for a divorce because we had too many children.”

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 20th, 2017