Mary Reed

Mary Reed was born in December 1854, in Lowell, Ohio, in a Methodist family. She grew up in the Midwest in a plain home. She was educated in the local schools and showed a gift for teaching. As a young woman, she was converted at a Methodist meeting and felt a call to the foreign field. She was accepted by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church and was sent to India in 1884. She was twenty-nine years old. She was assigned to Cawnpore, in northern India, where she worked as a teacher in a girls' school and as an evangelist.

She was a strong and cheerful woman. She spent her first years studying Hindi and working with the girls. She was also in touch with the village women, whom she visited in their homes. In 1890, she was struck down by fever and had to take a furlough. She went to the hills of Kumaon, in the foothills of the Himalayas, for her health, and then to the United States. While traveling in the hills, she noticed a spot on her foot that had no feeling. She was concerned, and she consulted a doctor. After examination, he told her that it was leprosy. It was a terrible blow. In that time, leprosy was a disease that was regarded with terror. It was thought to be incurable and was a cause for social exile.

She was devastated. She decided to return to India. She was told that she must leave her mission, since there was a fear of contagion. She did not want to burden her colleagues, so she went to a remote part of the hills, to a place called Chandag Heights, near Pithoragarh, in the Kumaon region. In 1891, she settled in a house at Chandag, which overlooked the snowy peaks of the Himalayas. There was a small colony of lepers nearby, who had been cast out by their families and were living in misery. She decided to give her life to them. She had been told that she had a short time to live, and she wanted to use it in the service of the lepers.

She went among the lepers and cared for them. She dressed their sores, fed them, comforted them and taught them about the love of Christ. She built a small home for them and later a church. She recruited help from other workers, and she was assisted by a Methodist missionary, Wilhelmina Mackenzie. She worked with the Mission to Lepers, a British society, which provided funds. She also lived in a small cottage near them. She cared for those who were dying and taught the children. She started a school and a clinic. She was joined by a number of other missionaries.

Many of the lepers became Christians. They lived with an unusual joy in the midst of suffering. She said that she found a peace that she had not known before. She wrote letters and articles about her work, which were published in the missionary press. They moved many to give. She was a woman of simple faith, and she spoke of the grace that sustained her. She was also a woman of great courage. She refused to give up when she was told that her disease would take her life.

In the 1900s, the disease seemed to be arrested in her case. She was examined by doctors, who found that the signs of the disease had receded. She lived for more than fifty years after her diagnosis. She was sometimes thought to have been healed, though she did not claim a miracle. She was a living witness to the care of God. She remained at Chandag until the end of her life. She made only a few visits to the United States and England.

She died in April 1943, at Chandag, at the age of eighty-eight. She had spent more than fifty years in service to the lepers. Her life shows the power of a woman who accepted a heavy trial and turned it into a gift. She did not hide her sickness but made it the means of her calling.