My search for a mule led me at last to the village of Campanillas, some six miles to the west of Ajoya, and linked with the Ajoya-San Ignacio road by a dirt track which apparently had not been navigated by a vehicle in more than a year. I managed to get my jeep in to the village, but not easily. It involved towing fallen trees out of the way, filling in washouts, and lumbering across freshly-plowed fields which obliterated the remains of the roadway.

This was my first visit to Campanillas, although many of its villagers had come to me for medicines, and I had a long-standing invitation to go there. It is an attractive village with about 20 loosely scattered, whitewashed adobe houses. I was hailed at the first house and invited to enter and to eat. My arrival was celebrated; I was conducted from house to house. I encountered an overabundance of patients, but no mule! In truth, it was what I expected.

Nearly all of the citizenry of Campanillas belong to one or the other, usually both, of two large and interbreeding families, the Manjarréz and the Arriolas. One stout woman complaining of epileptic fits asked me to go with her to see her aged father who, she said, was going deaf and blind, and was partly paralyzed and arthritic. The house was full of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of various shapes and sizes. The old and declining patriarch of the family, hunched and grizzled, was perched on the doorstop of the inner house. Eighty-two years before, Domingo Manjarréz had been christened after the patron saint of the village, Santo Domingo.

I examined the old man. One hand especially had a shrinking, almost stumping degeneracy, especially of the outer joints of the fingers. His daughter explained that this had resulted from an infection with persisting sores which had resulted from a golpe (blow) he had received while working the milpas. One of the old man’s feet, also, was considerably more shrunken than the other, and the big toe was entirely missing. This the daughter related to a severe machete cut on that foot some 40 years before. I asked the old man when and how he had lost the toe.

“Se me cayó sólo hace dos años.” (It fell off by itself two years ago.)

“¡Sólo!” I exclaimed:

“Sólo, mi hijo, sólo. Yo to enterré ahí atrás.” (By itself, my son, by itself. I buried it out back,”) And then he added, stoically, “¿Pues, que le hace? Ya no me duele… ¡Son las rodillas!” (Well what does it matter. Now it doesn’t hurt. . . it’s my knees!) And he touched his knees tenderly with his shrinking fingers and said, “No puedo andar.” (I can’t walk.)

Looking at old Domingo was to me like an experience of deja vu, I had seen those hands, those feet somewhere before, myriad feet, as in a nightmare. Suddenly I remembered with a shudder: hundreds of such hands, young and old, on the rocky road to Luxmanjula, lining the ancient pilgrim route of the Himalayas, near Rishikesh; hands reaching out to me as I passed on my way to the Ganges, hands of the diseased and starving, begging, entreating for the wherewithal to hang on a little longer to the last worn thread of life.

I asked the old man if he could feel anything in his hands and feet, any pain or sensation at all. He said he could not. His daughter explained that he had burned his hand with a cigarette not long ago and had not felt a thing. I nodded and quietly asked the daughter if I could talk to her alone. There was little doubt left in my mind.

The term lepra (leprosy) is used indiscriminately by the villagers of the Sierra Madre to describe any condition characterized by large, peesponded readily to soap, water, and antibiotic ointments, sometimes with the addition of systemic antibiotics. But the term “lepra” worried me. During one of my early visits to Mazatlán I asked the chief doctor at the Red Cross if there was any chance of true leprosy (Hanson’s Disease) in my region, and he assured me there was, and that there was a preparation for testing for it which I might be able to obtain at the Centro de Salud. However when I checked in at the Centro (my first visit) the Director told me, with a chuckle, that if there were, God forbid, any leprosy in the mountains of Sinaloa the entire Department of Health would be up in arms about it. I went away somewhat relieved, and wondering how the Chief Doctor of the Red Cross could be so mistaken.

However, as I resided longer in the mountains I heard the people refer at times to another disease which they appropriately called lazarín, and which seemed to have all the earmarks of leprosy. One day a man named Pedro Nuñez from a small distant village high in the sierra came to me with his body, particularly hands and face, eyelids and nasal passages covered with large, strange, purplish sores. Unsure of his condition, I sent him to the Centro de Salud in Mazatlán, together with a “carta de recomendación” to the Director suggesting the possibility of leprosy. That was the last I heard of Pedro until, a few days ago, Dr. Price and I visited the Centro de Salud in Mazatlán and I asked the Director if by chance the man’s disease had turned out to be the “enfermedad de Hanson”. The Director, reflecting back, replied that yes, he thought it had been. Ready at last to take us into his confidence, he announced that in Mexico one out of every 1000 persons is a leper! The region where I am located is an area of the highest concentration.

In Campanillas I found myself in a dilemma as to what to do about old Domingo. Leprosy is a contagious disease, although mildly. Outside Guadalajara there is a federally operated leper colony. By rights the old man should be sent there until he dies. But he loves his family dearly, and is loved and venerated in return. In talking to the old man’s daughter I found that, although she had attempted to explain his condition in terms of previous injuries, she was not surprised when I suggested lazarín, and admitted that for a long time they had been keeping his dishes apart from the rest of the family. I learned from another resident that Campanillas has a long history of leprosy.

If there is anything I dislike it is playing the villain, even for a good cause. I was not eager to have old Domingo, as result of my reporting his disease, hauled away to Guadalajara with the family protesting. I asked his daughter to consult with the family, explain the danger of leprosy to the others, especially to the children in the house, and then, if they agreed, I would inform the Health Department and they would likely see that Domingo was cared for in a place where his disease would not be a danger to others. Domingo’s daughter agreed to this. She said that when the men folk came back that evening she would talk with them and send me a note to Ajoya as to their decision the following day.

The following day a child came from Campanillas to pick up medicines I had agreed to send to various patients, but he brought no note. Day after day I waited, and finally, the night before I left for Verano, I sent off a letter to the Centro de Salud in Mazatlán, advising of Domingo’s condition.