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Kate Marsden - Founder of the Guild
St Francis Leprosy Guild (known until the 1960s as St Francis Leper Guild) was founded on 23 October 1895 by a group of lay people in London. Blessed Damien, who had worked for years among leprosy sufferers at Molokai in Hawaii, had recently died and his fame had spread around the world arousing considerable concern about leprosy, for which at that time there was no known cure. Kate Marsden, the moving spirit behind the Guild’s foundation, had witnessed the horrors of leprosy while a nurse during the Turko-Russian war in the 1870s. In 1890 she obtained the patronage of Queen Victoria, Princess Alexandra and the Empress of Russia (and a blessing from Florence Nightingale), and set off for Yakutia, the far north eastern region of Siberia in search of a herb reputed to cure leprosy, and to see how best to help the people affected by leprosy known to be scattered in that vast forest area. 
Epic journey
She and her interpreter travelled by sledge, not, she says with quiet humour, “the nice roomy bath chair some people might imagine”, but bumping and jolting for hours on end on a layer of straw laid over their provisions: tea, sugar and New Testaments for the prisoners they visited on the way, and quantities of plum pudding “which would keep in cold weather as all housewives know” as their staple food. At Omsk, a Russian soldier replaced her lady interpreter, who was too ill to continue. At Irkutsk, she organised a committee before going on to Yakutsk, capital of Yakutia. From there she set off on horseback on the 2000 mile journey to Viluisk and then to the scattered groups of people with leprosy living in dreadful conditions in the region. On her return to Irkutsk she saw to it that the committee raised £1,150 locally before returning to Moscow and St Petersburg to find nuns and nurses and further financial help for the planned leprosy hospital at Viluisk. The Bishop of Yakutsk, did have specimens of the herb, her original quest, but researches so far have not revealed whether she brought them back to London with the soil samples she scooped up and the uncomfortable square wooden saddle she rode on. Continuing the work On her return to England she wrote a book On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers and lectured in England and the United States to publicise the plight of leprosy sufferers and to raise funds. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; converted to Catholicism; became a Franciscan Tertiary; and was the moving sprit in the founding of St Francis Leprosy Guild in 1895. Controversial figure As an energetic and high profile figure she aroused jealousy and controversy. During her two years in Russia she was suspected of being a spy; her conversion to Catholicism was criticised; even her election to the Royal Geographical Society aroused opposition. The Victorian age produced some remarkable women, but Kate Marsden’s energy and vision were exceptional. |
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St Francis Leprosy Guild, 73 St Charles Square, London W10 6EJ
Tel: 020 8969 1345 - Fax: 020 8969 3272 - E-mail: enquiries@StFrancisLeprosy.org
Charity No: 208741