2023-10-31 06:37:37
It was in 1726 that the first cases of leprosy were reported on Isle Bourbon. But if we identify and keep a grim account of lepers, nothing, or very little, is done to help them and even less to treat them. It was not until 1856 that a leprosarium was created and lepers might be treated. Located in Saint-Bernard, the site operated until 1982.
In 1840, a commission proposed that lepers be parked in an isolated site where they might receive care. But the administration does not have the financial means for this proposal to see the light of day. But the lepers frighten the good people and there is a fear of contagion. In 1850, Governor Doret received various complaints from notables, notably accusing the mayors of doing nothing to curb the spread of leprosy or to intervene in any way with lepers.
According to a census carried out in 1852, there were officially 107 cases of people suffering from this terrible disease: 90 men and 17 women. It is in Saint-Paul that there are the greatest number of victims (16), Sainte-Suzanne and Saint-André counting 14 and 13 respectively and Saint-Louis 12.
The year 1852 marks the real beginning of the administration’s involvement in the fight once morest leprosy and the care of lepers. A decree from Governor Louis Isaac Hilaire Doret, dated February 25, 1852, decides to automatically confine “any individual recognized as leprous by the health commission” to the place called “Ravine à Jacques”, not far from the Grande Chaloupe. In this particularly isolated place, each sick person is now fed and cared for at the expense of the colony.
If the colonial administration is no longer indifferent, the situation of the lepers reclusive in the former lazaret of Ravine à Jacques is however far from idyllic. When he visited the site on September 21, 1853, Governor Hubert De Lisle, who succeeded Governor Doret, discovered a calamitous situation, both on a human, medical and health level, which he would strive to improve by all means. a series of measures.
After the Ravine à Jacques, the lepers were transferred to another site, at the foot of the Saint-François hill, in the heart of Saint-Denis. But this “promiscuity” between lepers and the rest of the population led the governor to resettle the lepers in another place: it was Saint-Bernard, in the Mountain, from 1856. It was there that for more than a century , the island’s lepers were confined and cared for until the establishment closed in 1982… Since then, the place has found a new life with shops and in particular a restaurant.
Sources: “From cob to stone” (Prosper Eve – 1999)
The shadow of Mary Magdalene of the Cross…
On April 16, 1849, Aimée Pignolet de Fresnes, who became Marie Magdeleine of the Cross, created the only “péi” congregation with a creed, an oath made on October 15, 1840, in front of her dying father. : “I want to devote myself to the service of the most abandoned beings, especially the old, the infirm, the lepers. This part that the world rejects will henceforth be mine.”
All her life, she brought the strength of her faith and her dedication to the cause of lepers.
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