1914–2003 · English hand surgeon & leprosy pioneer
Paul Wilson Brand was an English surgeon who pioneered tendon-transfer techniques for the hands of people with leprosy, and the first physician to appreciate that leprosy destroys tissue not directly but by destroying the sensation of pain, leaving patients unable to protect themselves from injury. That lifelong preoccupation with pain, injury and care runs straight through his popular books with the writer Philip Yancey, and it is in the first of them, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (1980), that the healed-femur anecdote first appears in print. Brand told it as a memory of a Margaret Mead lecture he had attended decades earlier — and his memory is the only evidence the story has ever had.