I’m currently reading Oliver Basciano’s Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World, which includes the extraordinary story of Kate Marsden.

Marsden, born to middle-class parents in Edmonton in London in 1839, found her calling in ministering to lepers in Russia, where she hoped to find a cure, and would eventually produce a best-selling book about her exploits called On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers in 1893.

She never fully recovered from her 2,000 mile journey, but it led to celebrity. She had a private audience with Queen Victoria, became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and founded a charity which is today known as St Francis Leprosy Guild.

Marsden’s journey and her book did not meet with general approval, and many readers found it difficult to accept what she claimed, with some openly suggesting that she had undertaken the trip to Russia to atone for her homosexuality, rather than seeking a cure for leprosy.

W T Stead, the famous Victorian newspaperman, openly ridiculed what she wrote, and the Reverend Alexander Francis – a St Petersburg-based priest – alleged that Marsden had committed fraud.

Marsden initially thought about suing for libel and would eventually bring a case, but dropped that after noting what had happened to Oscar Wilde in his court proceedings against the Marquis of Queensbury, who had left Wilde a note at his club describing him as a “posing sodomite”.

I’ve thought about Marsden and her search for a cure for leprosy a lot recently given the controversy surrounding The Salt Path – the 2018 best-selling book written by Raynor Winn and which........

© Herald Scotland