Ruth Pfau

Ruth Pfau (1929 to 2017) was a German-born Catholic religious sister and physician who spent more than fifty-five years fighting leprosy in Pakistan. Born in Leipzig, she studied medicine at Mainz and Marburg, converted to Catholicism and joined the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in Paris in 1957. A visa problem in 1960 left her in Karachi, where she visited the leprosy colony behind McLeod Road and resolved to make the care of those patients her life work, starting treatment in a hut there. Her work grew into a national effort, and the source credits her with helping establish 157 leprosy clinics across Pakistan that treated more than 56,000 people. In 1979 she became Federal Advisor on Leprosy to the Pakistani Ministry of Health, and she received Pakistani citizenship in 1988. She died in August 2017 and was buried with full state honours; a medical college and a hospital in Karachi bear her name.