Putting It All Together 08-25-15

Philip Yancey wrote the memoirs of Dr. Brand, a surgeon and leprosy specialist who lived a third of his life in India. Accompanying Dr. Brand (who was 80 years old at the time) back to India, Yancey was able to meet scores of people who had been loved and helped by this famous and beloved physician. Among others, he met a man named Sadan, one of Dr. Brand’s leprosy patients. Sadan looked like a miniature version of Gandhi: skinny, balding, perched cross-legged on the edge of a bed. In a high-pitched, singsong voice he told Yancey wrenching stories of past rejection: the classmates who made fun of him in school, the driver who kicked him—literally, with his shoe—off a public bus, the many employers who refused to hire him despite his training and talent, the hospitals that turned him away.

“When I got to Vellore, I spent the night on the Brands’ verandah, because I had nowhere else to go,” Sadan said. “That was unheard of for a person with leprosy back then. I can still remember when Dr. Brand took my infected, ulcerated feet in his hands. I had been to many doctors. A few had examined my hands and feet from a distance, but Dr. Brand and his wife were the first medical workers who dared to touch me. I had nearly forgotten what human touch felt like.”

Sadan then recounted the elaborate sequence of medical procedures—tendon transfers, nerve strippings, toe amputations, and cataract removal—performed by Dr. Brand and his ophthalmologist wife. He spoke for half an hour. His past life was a catalogue of human suffering. But as he and Yancey sipped their last cup of tea in Sadan’s home, just before leaving to catch a plane to England, Sadan made this astonishing statement: “Still, I must say that I am now happy that I had this disease!” “Happy?” Yancey asked incredulous.

“Yes,” replied Sadan. “Apart from leprosy, I would have been a normal man with a normal family, chasing wealth and a higher position in society. I would never have known such wonderful people as Dr. Paul and Dr. Margaret, and I would never have known the God who lives in them!”