POSTSCRIPT
"As before, all the pictures are from the vast collection at the Leonard Wood Memorial Laboratory in Cebu, Philippines. Because of the time span of over 30 years during which several different persons acted as photographers, the quality of the pictures are not as uniform as we would have liked, but I hope each picture is clear enough to show what it is supposed to represent. We fully realize that this new edition is still far from ideal, but we have decided to go ahead with the publication so soon after the original one, because we saw a great and urgent need for this kind of color illustration on leprosy both as a training material on leprosy for various categories of health workers, and as a practical working manual for field workers, many of whom are increasingly serving as multipurpose health rather than specialized leprosy workers."
"This Atlas is intended primarily for use in the countries in East and Southeast Asia inhabited mostly by the poeple of light brown skin complexion. We are happy to note that there are a few other attempts to publish similar atlas of leprosy on dark or fair skinned people, and all of these atlases should complement each other and together present more or less complete range of clinical manifestation of leprosy. We hope any imperfections of our two editions will be excused as a result of an early or initial attempts which leads to better publication later by others."
"I learned from Mrs. Guinto that one of the unfulfilled hopes of Dr. R.S. Guinto was to write an authoritative and comprehensive book on leprosy. Perhaps he realized that this Atlas could form a part of or supplement to such a book. In any case this apparently became his last work, because I was informed that his last working hours were spent on the revision of the original edition, and his last communication was a letter addressed to me concerning this Atlas posted only few hours before his death which I did not receive until my return from Cebu attending his funeral and burial services. Dr. Guinto's untimely death was a great shock and is a great loss to us, because he was one of the staunch supporters and willing collaborators of the activities of our Foundation ever since it was established in 1974. We therefore decided to make this book a memorial publication for Dr. Guinto as a token of our renewed pledge to continue the fight against leprosy in which he was such a great leader and a noble example."
The above are the exact quotes of some paragraphs from the previous postscript written in December 1983, nearly 11 years ago. To our great surprise, the demand for this Atlas has remained very strong, and this is the 9th reprint of the English version. In addition, this Atlas is published in six other languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish. The total number of Atlas published so far has reached 55,730 copies. This reflects the existence of great needs on the one hand, and an obvious dearth of such material on the other. As the global expansion of MDT successfully reduces the case load in practically every endemic country, and leprosy control work faces a new challenge of finding and treating fewer cases scattered in many parts of a country, the role of general or multipurpose health workers in case detection and case management becomes ever more important. This calls for development of a suitable manual for thier work, and pictorial presentation of skin lesions must be an integral part of such manual. It is perhaps a high time for those involved, including our Foundation, to carefully assess the global needs and start meeting such needs, rather than just reproducing what we already have.
December, 1994
Dr. Yo Yuasa
Executive and Medical Director
Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation
