I first met Paul Brand when I was about 14 - then he was just my best friend´s dad. Over the next few years I began to realise something more about Paul - he was quite an extraordinary man of God.

Paul was a man of many talents and interests: he was a reasonable painter, an inspirational teacher, a great preacher and speaker, author of several books, a committed environmentalist, organic gardener and avid ornithologist, and of course a brilliant and innovative surgeon who challenged the way the world thought about leprosy and those who suffer from it.

Paul Brand was born in 1914, in the cheerily named Mountains of Death in South West India. His parents were missionaries wholly dedicated to God, the poor and the sick. As a very small child, Paul accompanied his father to the mountain villages watching him practice fairly basic medicine. Paul loved India, loved his parents and respected their work but he did not love medicine, finding it too messy and yukky! So after school, and now in Britain, Paul became an apprentice carpenter and spent four years working in the building trade. However, at missionary college, it became clear to him that if he wanted to work for God overseas it would be as a trained doctor. In his first week at medical school he met Margaret who shared his deep commitment to work for God overseas. They married and worked together until the end of Paul´s life.

After qualifying, and a few years of treating WW2 bomb victims in London, Paul volunteered to go to India (Vellore) and teach surgery. The idea of leprosy work never occured to him until he arrived in India and encountered the beggars, most of whom had leprosy. He was moved by their plight having been driven out of their homes and ostracised by friends and family.

Shortly after his arrival in Vellore, one of Paul´s colleagues (Dr Cochrane) challenged him to find out what caused the deformity of the hands in leprosy patients. Paul discovered that contrary to popular belief, fingers do not just become rotten and fall off. Hands do become deformed, there is muscle wastage and fingers become useless for fine motor movements. BUT Paul found the grip of leprosy patients to be very strong. Hidden away in the depths of the hand were muscles that appeared not to be wasting. Paul reported this to Dr Cochrane and asked why and how this should be. The reply was basically, "You´re the orthopaedic surgeon - go figure." The combination of his discovery about the muscles in the hand, the challenge from his respected colleague and a "tingling sense" that God was speaking to him, made Paul realise that this was why he had come to India.

There were many obstacles to Paul´s work. He had no beds in the hospital, no medical staff and there was a natural prejudice against leprosy sufferers. Refusing to be daunted, Paul trained a team of technicians to go out into the surrounding area to leprosariums and local missions and set up testing stations to measure the muscle strength and sensation in peoples´ hands. The team collected thousands of records, the results were analysed and what Paul termed a "beautiful pattern" emerged. Unlike polio with which they were familiar and where the muscle wastage was random, in leprosy the same muscles were always affected and the same muscles were always spared.

Paul´s first operation to move around the good muscles and tendons in the hand was performed on a patient whose hands were deemed to be so bad that he couldn´t make them any worse!! Fortunately for that patient and the many hundreds of thousands of leprosy patients since, the operation was a great success. The wounds healed (a major concern) and the fine motor movement was greatly improved.

Many hand operations followed and Paul and his team were feeling rather flushed with success, until one patient came back and said that they had given him "bad hands". The problem was, beggars with deformed and useless hands got money. The ones with good looking, working hands did not.

That patient challenged Paul to look at the whole man (a concept familiar in mission these days but this was the early 1950´s). Leprosy patients needed a new life including a trade, not just new hands.

This prompted the founding of the New Life Centre where patients were taught skills to enable them to learn practical trades and, in some cases, to start their own cottage industries. Paul used his training as carpenter to teach the patiients to use the tools and just as importantly not to damage their vulnerable hands. A surgeon by day, a carpenter again by evening, Paul was astounded to realise that God had known that he would need both carpentry and surgical skills in order to serve leprosy sufferers effectively.

Paul then turned his attention to feet where he developed (among other things) special shoes which enabled the patients to walk without their feet breaking down and ulcerating. In 1965, after eighteen years, more than three thousand surgeries and six children, Paul and Margaret left India to accept work at the United States Public Health Service Leprosy Centre in Carville, Louisiana. Paul was chief of rehabilitation there for twenty years before he "retired" to Seattle from where he continued to travel the world lecturing, as well as teaching at the University of Washington. He and/or Margaret tried to visit India every year or two. Paul finally stopped travelling and speaking about nine months before he died. I think it would be fair to say that he was not entirely at ease with the less active life.

Paul died in July 2003 at the age of 89. Around that time, his good friend Philip Yancy wrote these words:

"I have often written of bad doses of faith I got here and there. Truly I believe that God brought Paul Brand into my life of that I could take all the time in the world to examine one human being and learn what God had in mind with the whole creation experiment. No one has affected my faith more. You only need to meet one saint to believe, and I had the inestimable privilege of spending leisurely hours on visits, trips and phone conversations picking apart a saint piece by piece. He stood up to scrutiny."