Dr. Ruth Pfau, a German-born medical missionary who was hailed as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan” for her pivotal role in containing leprosy there, died on Thursday in a hospital in Karachi. She was 87.
Her death was announced by Prime Minister Shahid Abbasi, who said she would receive a state funeral. She had kidney and heart disease.
“Dr. Ruth came to Pakistan here at the dawn of a young nation, looking to make lives better for those afflicted by disease, and in doing so, found herself a home,” Mr. Abbasi said. Although she was born in Germany, he added, “her heart was always in Pakistan.”
Leprosy, a disfiguring and stigmatizing ailment also known as Hansen’s disease, can now be prevented and even cured after early diagnosis.
Less than four decades after Dr. Pfau (pronounced fow) began her campaign to contain leprosy, a mildly contagious bacterial infection, the World Health Organization declared it under control in Pakistan in 1996, ahead of most other Asian countries (although several hundred new cases are still reported there annually).
ADVERTISEMENT
Dr. Pfau, who had converted to Roman Catholicism and become a nun, discovered her calling to help lepers coincidentally.
In 1960, she was waylaid in Pakistan by a passport foul-up en route to a posting in India by her Roman Catholic order, the Society of Daughters of the Heart of Mary. By chance, she visited a leper colony in Karachi, where she met one of the thousands of Pakistani patients afflicted with the disease.
“He must have been my age — I was at this time not yet 30 — and he crawled on hands and feet into this dispensary, acting as if this was quite normal,” she told the BBC in 2010, “as if someone has to crawl there through that slime and dirt on hands and feet, like a dog.”
The encounter stunned her.
“I could not believe that humans could live in such conditions,” she told the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune in 2014. “That one visit, the sights I saw during it, made me make a key life decision.”
Dr. Pfau joined the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center, opened in 1956 in the Karachi slums and named for a founder of the order of nuns that ran it. She soon transformed it into the hub of a network of 157 medical centers that treated tens of thousands of Pakistanis infected with leprosy.
Funded mostly by German, Austrian and Pakistani donors, the center and its satellite clinics also treated victims of the 2000 drought in Balochistan, the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and devastating floods in 2010.
Once leprosy was declared under control, the center also focused on tuberculosis, blindness and other diseases and on disabilities, some caused by land mines in war-torn Afghanistan.
Dr. Pfau was often compared to Mother Teresa (now Saint Teresa of Calcutta), the nun, born in what is today Macedonia, who ministered to the poor in India.
Mervyn Lobo, the chief executive of the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center, said that Dr. Pfau had “played a dynamic role in removing the stigma attached to the healing of leprosy patients.”
Harald Meyer-Porzky, deputy chief executive of the German Leprosy and Tuberculosis Relief Foundation and a board member of the Ruth Pfau Foundation, said that she had “enabled hundreds of thousands of people to live with dignity.”
The German consulate in Karachi declared, “It was due to her endless struggle that Pakistan defeated leprosy.”
Ruth Katharina Martha Pfau, the fourth of five daughters, was born on Sept. 9, 1929, in Leipzig, in eastern Germany, to Walter and Martha Pfau.
As a teenager, she barely survived Allied bombing, which severely damaged her home during World War II.
She was inspired to become a doctor shortly after the war, when her baby brother became ill and died. She escaped from the Soviet Occupation Zone in 1948 and followed her father to Wiesbaden, in West Germany, to study gynecology at the University of Mainz and in Marburg.
At college, after meeting an elderly Christian concentration camp survivor who had devoted the rest of her life to preaching love and forgiveness, she rejected a marriage proposal from a fellow student. She was baptized in the evangelical tradition, converted to Catholicism and joined the Society of Daughters of the Heart of Mary in 1957.
“When you receive such a calling, you cannot turn it down, for it is not you who has made the choice,” she told The Express Tribune. “For it is not you who has made the choice. God has chosen you for himself.”
She arrived in Vellore, India, in 1961 for training, then returned to Pakistan to organize a leprosy-control program and, with Dr. Zarina Fazelbhoy, one of her many collaborators, a tutorial for paramedics.
Even after she gave up the directorship of the center in 2006, she lived in a single room there, rising at 5 a.m. to fulfill her obligations as a nun and, beginning at 8 a.m., tending to patients and running interference with government bureaucrats.
“We are like a Pakistani marriage,” she said. “It was an arranged marriage because it was necessary. We always and only fought with each other. But we never could go in for divorce, because we had too many children.”
She expressed hope that democracy would take hold in Pakistan, but was not optimistic. “Democracy needs education, and education is barely given any attention in Pakistan,” she said.
Dr. Pfau wrote four books about her work in Pakistan, including “To Light a Candle” (1987), which was translated into English. In another book, she explained that she had no intention of ever retiring completely.
“I don’t use the word ‘retirement,’ ” she wrote. “It sounds as if you had completed everything, as if life was over and the world was in order.”
Her only wish was that she would not experience a violent death. (She died peacefully, and with no immediate survivors). She expressed no regrets about her life.
“Leading a life committed to service does protect the soul from wounds,” she said. “These are the workings of God.”
