Hannah Riddell

Hannah Riddel is a fascinating biography of the British woman who pioneered the treatment of leprosy in Meiji-era Japan. In the late nineteenth century hundreds of Christian missionaries were dispatched to Japan to convert the "heathen," a task that many felt could be accomplished within a few decades. That expectation proved to be wildly optimistic, since today fewer than one percent of Japanese are Christian. The efforts and even the names of those early missionaries are now largely forgotten,