Mary Reed Contracted Leprosy Tending other Victims of the Disease
Mary Reed in 1938.
MARY REED was born in Lowell, Ohio, in 1854. Converted to Christ at the age of sixteen, she immediately recognized she was meant to serve in Christ’s kingdom. For ten years she taught school before going to India as a Methodist missionary in 1884 to work among women confined to zenanas—the courtyards of their homes.
Her health soon faltered in the hot climate and the mission sent her to a cooler mountain retreat to recover. There she encountered many people suffering from leprosy and gave them what help she could. She continued to serve as a missionary for several more years before ill-health forced her to return to the United States.
While in America she began to pay attention to some symptoms that had troubled her for some time. For instance, she was experiencing a tingling sensation in one finger. Spots had developed on her body. One day it dawned on her that she had probably contracted leprosy. Because rural American doctors had little knowledge of the disease, a firm diagnosis had to wait until she could speak with experts in New York. They confirmed her suspicion. To protect her family from exposure, she left the United States abruptly without embracing her dearest relatives, telling only one sister the reason for her sudden departure.
Reed believed God had sent her the disease as a way of opening her way for a new work. A Mission to Lepers accepted her as superintendent of the Chandag Heights Leprosy Home at a beautiful location in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains. Sympathy for her condition caused many people to support the work. For several years she supervised Methodist mission work in the area, as well as managing and expanding the separate work of the Mission to Lepers.
The disease continued its progress, attacking her vocal chords, too, but advanced much more slowly than was usual. Although she administered medicines to those at her missions and had no personal objection to medicine, from the start she felt convinced the Lord did not want her to employ any herself. In 1896, in answer to her prayers and the prayers of many others, her disease went into remission. Critics claimed she never had leprosy at all.
In 1898, exhausted by her role with the two missions, she left the Methodist work and devoted herself exclusively to those suffering from leprosy. Most of the people who came to Chandag Heights became Christians. Cast out from their families and offered no solace in their traditional religion, they found great appeal in Christianity. Many showed evidence of new life, turning from selfish and quarrelsome behavior to peaceable and service-oriented attitudes. Such evidence of her usefulness caused Reed to write, “Oh, how my heart goes out in praise and gratitude to Him who so wonderfully verifies his blessed promise, ‘Lo, I am with you always.’”
When Reed was an old woman, her leprosy began to spread again. Thankfully, drugs now existed to control it and this time she felt no hindrance to using them. Almost completely blind by 1938, she retired. Five years later, on this day, 8 April 1943, she died at Chandag Heights, faithful to Christ to the end. “Jesus has enabled me to say not with a sigh but with a song, ‘Thy will be done.’” She was buried at the foot of a chapel that she had built.
—Dan Graves
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One of the most famous missionaries among people with leprosy was Father Damien, whose story is told in Molokai. Watch at RedeemTV.
Molokai can be purchased at Vision Video.