Ernest W Price
Dr Ernest Woodward Price MD, FRCSE, DTM&H,OBE was a missionary doctor, orthopaedic surgeon, leprosy specialist and the discoverer of podoconiosis, one of the neglected tropical diseases. A list of his publications is available online.
Early life
He was born in Sheffield to Baptist missionary parents, Rev. Ernest Price and Edith Letitia née Woodward. When he was three years old, the family moved to Kingston, Jamaica, where his father had been appointed headmaster of Calabar High School, a boarding school for the sons of Baptist ministers working in rural areas of Jamaica.Education
With his two brothers, Neville Grenville Price born 26 May 1911 and Bernard Henry Price born 27 January 1913, he went to his father's school, Calabar High School. From there all three brothers went to Cambridge University. E W Price was at St John's College from 1926 to 1929. He trained in medicine at Charing Cross Hospital 1929-1933. In 1935, he went out with the Baptist Missionary Society as a missionary doctor to Pimu hospital in the Belgian Congo, after gaining his diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp.Personal life
Price met his wife, Dorothy Marjorie Williams while on a sabbatical in the UK, studying to specialise in orthopaedic surgery. They were married on 24 July 1947 at Seaford Baptist church, Sussex. She too was a Baptist missionary and had been working as a nurse at Yakusu mission hospital, DRC. They had two children; Michael Ernest Price, born Kimpese DRC 2 April 1953 and adopted a daughter in 1955. Price did not retire to the UK until 1974 when he received his OBE and became a member of the Ethiopian Order of Menelik II. He died aged 82 in Reepham, Norfolk.Baptist missionary, Belgian Congo 1935–1956
He went out with the Baptist Missionary Society as a missionary doctor in 1935 to Pimu hospital, DRC in what was then the Belgian Congo. He was at Pimu Hospital, Province of Équateur until 1946, most of the time as the only doctor there. He remained in the Belgian Congo in World War II. In 1930 there had been 30 Protestant missionaries in the Congo, but by 1939 Dr. Price was one of only five left. Although Belgium had been invaded by the Nazis, the Belgian government in exile in London continued to control the Congo and its valuable resources. In 1944 he published a paper on the grammar of the Ngombe language and thereafter contributed to the updating of the British and Foreign Bible Society's 1930 Ngombe New Testament, which was republished in 1956. In 1947 he was sent on a sabbatical to the UK by the Baptist Missionary Society to specialise as an orthopaedic surgeon. Returning to the Congo he went first to Sona Bata mission, which already had a medical aide training school, and where he was tasked with helping to build Kimpese hospital. Kimpese hospital was set up by the Protestant missions in the Congo as an interdenominational training hospital for medical auxiliaries. A Protestant hospital at Kimpese had first been mooted in 1923, but was strongly resisted by the Roman Catholic Church. Before the war, the Belgian colonial government had refused to subsidise any Protestant educational enterprise, even the training of medical aides. After the war this policy was reversed by the Socialist governments of Achille Van Acker and Protestant establishments were subsidised on the same basis as Catholic ones. As a result, the Protestant IME Kimpese could be opened. He was at IME Kimpese as an orthopaedic surgeon 1947-1956. He was succeeded in this post, as he had been at Pimu by Dr David Hedley Wilson, later the first President of the Royal college of Emergency Medicine. Another doctor, who worked at Pimu as a BMS missionary in the 1980s, was Dr Adrian Hopkins, later famous as an ophthalmologist and specialist in onchocerciaisis. IME Kimpese "became rapidly known throughout the lower Congo river and beyond for the high standard of its nursing school and hospital". During this time, Dr Price developed an interest in the rehabilitation of leprosy patients.Nigerian Colonial Medical Service 1957–1959
In 1957 E W Price was appointed to the Colonial Medical Service of the then Eastern Region, Nigeria later Biafra. He was appointed to work as an orthopaedic surgeon working on the rehabilitation of leprosy patients. He was based first at Uzuakoli leprosarium and Research centre, where Frank Davey was working on the new Dapsone treatment of leprosy. He then moved to the Oji River leprosarium where set up a shoe making workshop. During this time, he wrote a stream of papers setting out the natural history, treatment and prevention of plantar ulcers in leprosy. These papers formed the basis of his M.D. 1961. As his obituary in the Leprosy Review reads, "This work, together with the work concurrently being undertaken by Dr Paul Brand and his colleagues in India, had a revolutionary impact on ideas about concerning the aetiology and treatment of ulcers occurring in neuropathic feet.". However the distinguished Indian leprologist Hariharan Srinivasan, writing in 1968, gave Price sole credit for elucidating the cause of plantar ulcers, not mentioning Paul Brand. Price's African patients walked barefoot and he found that wearing soles made of wood could prevent the recurrence of these ulcers, once they had been healed. Price's career in Nigeria was cut short by a serious car accident. He then spent three years as an NHS consultant pathologist at East Birmingham hospitals, now Heartlands Hospital.During this time, he gained a Cambridge MD, based on his work on plantar ulcers in Nigeria.Leprosy work in Ethiopia, 1962–1974
In 1962 Price moved to Ethiopia where he was to have a key role in Leprosy treatment, control and rehabilitation over the next twelve years. Initially he was effectively in charge of Leprosy work in Ethiopia and at the Princess Zenebework Hospital and leprosarium. This changed after the formation of ALERT in Addis Ababa in 1965. He then became chief of the Leprosy Control Project, Imperial Ethiopian Ministry of Public Health, Addis Ababa, though still maintaining other responsibilities. As the famous leprologist Stanley George Browne wrote; "Earlier attempts had been made to treat people without disrupting their daily lives. Dr E W Price, … reported on a novel approach to leprosy control, which he called a 'market saturation' approach. He treated people on market days, when they gathered in their market places. This suited a country with a scattered population, poor communications and rudimentary health services." During this time, he also undertook various short-term consultancies throughout the world on behalf of WHO.Research fellow, Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 1972
Since its publication, Price has been widely recognised as the discover of podoconiosis. The disease itself has been recognised by WHO as an "important neglected tropical disease", and there is a research group led by Gail Davey based in the Wellcome Trust Brighton and Sussex Centre for Global Health Research devoted to this disease. Davey also founded the charity Footwork, The International Podoconiosis Initiative.E W Price died on 31 January 1990, aged 82, in Reepham, Norfolk.