Ruth Pfau

Pfau was born at Leipzig to Lutheran Christian parents, one of six children; the family home was destroyed by wartime bombing, and after the war the family moved from the Soviet occupation zone to West Germany. She studied medicine at Mainz and Marburg. The English article records that she was baptised as a Protestant in 1951, before her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1953, and that she was influenced in this period by Josef Pieper's writings on Thomas Aquinas and by Romano Guardini's The Lord; the German article independently records the same path — baptism in 1951, conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1953. In 1957 she travelled to Paris and joined the Daughters of the Heart of Mary. ^{1 2}

Her order posted her to southern India, but a visa problem in 1960 stranded her in Karachi, where she visited the lepers' colony behind McLeod Road and decided that the care of leprosy patients would be her life's calling. She began treating patients in a hut; the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre was founded from that work, a leprosy clinic was bought in April 1963, and her network grew to 157 leprosy clinics across Pakistan that treated over 56,780 people. In 1979 she was appointed Federal Advisor on Leprosy to the Government of Pakistan, raised donations in Germany and Pakistan, and cooperated with hospitals in Rawalpindi and Karachi. ^{1 3}

She died in the early morning of 10 August 2017 at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi, having refused life support in accordance with her wish for a natural life. The state funeral was held on 19 August 2017 at St Patrick's Cathedral, with Archbishop Joseph Coutts presiding over the Requiem, the flags of Pakistan and Vatican City at half mast, her coffin draped in the Pakistani flag and a nineteen-gun salute from all three armed services; she was buried at the Gora Qabaristan Christian cemetery in Karachi. The Civil Hospital Karachi was renamed the Dr Ruth Pfau Hospital in her honour. ^{1 4}

Her faith is recorded as Christian, documented. The attestation is textual and repeated: the English article's lead calls her a Catholic religious sister and a member of the Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, and describes her 1953 conversion to Roman Catholicism; the German article opens with the same description in its own words; the Urdu article names her membership of the society and the Arabic article calls her a nun in it. This is the museum's standard case of a documented current affiliation recorded in the sources themselves. ^{1 2 3 4}

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