AMONG THE LEPERS OF SIBERIA
Two sides of Kate Marsden's work among the Siberian lepers

Among the lepers of Siberia

Kate Marsden is well-known for her travel to save the lepers of Siberia. Following her daring trip, she also wrote a book called On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers. Very little is known of her own life though, she includes almost no personal details in the narrative. Below is a contemporary article from the Newark Daily Associate which sheds some additional light on what issues surrounded her during her lifetime. "There are two sides to the story of Miss Kate Marsden, the personable English woman, no longer young, but not yet old, upon whom the mantle of Florence Nightingale has been declared to have fallen. Miss Marsden became famous because of her investigations of lebrosy as it exists in Siberia. The story of those investigations, as told by herself, makes her out to be brave, self sacrificing, with plenty of nerve and of extraordinary endurance. It was in 1889 that she came to the front. She was then in Berlin, and she was out of money. "She had heard of a wonderful plant that grew in Siberia, which was a specific for leprosy and with which some Siberian lepers were curing themselves. She longed to go to Siberia and find this plant. At the same time she proposed to look into the state of the lepers themselves. She had heard that because of their poverty and ignorance but few were able to avail themselves of its potency, and that most of them suffered the tortures of slow starvation by reason of the isolation insisted upn by the communities in which they lived. She had a notion that it would be well to found a colony where all the lepers might be gathered and treated with the herb, and that she was the one to found such a colony. "The Empress Frederick, to whose attention Miss Marsden's plan was brought, was greatly interested and wrote letters to mother Victoria, the queen of England, and brother Albert Edward, the prince of Wales. The Marsden record was looked up, and it was found that she had served as a Red Cross nurse in the Russo-Turkish war; that she had, after that contest, resided for some years in New Zealand, where she had won fame and good will by her work as a nurse, and that she had also tended the sick most faithfully in South Africa. "The royal minds were greatly prepossessed in Miss Marsden's favor by this, and the result was that in 1890, with letters in her pocket that introduced her to the czarina, she went to St. Petersburg, where she was furnished with every facility to do her work. The help extended included a letter from the highest imperial authorities and an escort of soldiers during the time she should journey in Siberia. Of her journeyings she gave most interesting accounts upon her return. She rode horseback much of the time, booted, trousered and astride, like a man. She suffered cold, hunger and fatigue. Her course often led through morass and pathless forests, and her road had sometimes to be cleared in advance of her progress by sturdy axmen. "She found about 300 lepers, all told, and they were in frightful condition. They lived in huts separate from their fellows, they were insufficiently fed and clad, and their lot was inexpressively deplorable. She did not find the healing plant, but she heard ot it and believed thoroughly it its existence. Neither did she found the colony. It was necessary for her to rest before entering upon that part of the work. Besides the needful money must be raised. "So she returned to London, whence a little later she came to America. Here she declared that she proposed shortly to investigate the lepers of Kamchatka, who, she understood, were in even worse condition that those of Siberia. She made many friends in this country and then went back to London. This was in 1892, and a short time after her book, descriptive of her work among the Siberian lepers, was issued. "Now comes the other side of the story. Her book displeased in Russia, where it was averred that there were no lepers in Siberia -- at least only a few -- and they, it was said, were not suffering from want of attention, because they were cared for by the imperial government. Gross exaggeration of Siberian matters generally, it was declared, were to be found on every page of the volume. An investigation committee took the matter up then, and its report has laterly been made public. It declares Kate Marsden to be a fraud. There are hints of an intrigue between her and a Russian noble, and it is alleged that she did not half the great things she says she did. "She denies it all, says the present report contradicts directly to an earlier one, and that she shall bring suit for libel against Rev. Mr. Francis, pastor of the British-American church at St. Petersburg, chairman of the committee, and M. Pobedonostzeff, procurator of the holy synod, who indorses the report. "That is the gist of the dark side of the story, but it should be added that queer rumors concerning Miss Marsden have also laterly arrived in London from New Zealand. The reader is at liberty to form his own opinion." By the book -- Kate Marsden: On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers Kate Marsden among the lepers of Siberia Thibet (Tibet) North polar exploration The Imperial Family of Russia - The Romanoff Dynasty Cossacks - The Origin of the Term "Cossack" Czar Interview Count Tolstoi Russian names in English The Sinking of the Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters