Frans Hemerijckx

Frans Hemerijckx (1902–1969) was a Flemish leprologist, humanist and the founder of the Damien Foundation in Belgium, a non profit non governmental organization engaged in providing treatment and rehabilitation services to people afflicted with leprosy. He spent most of his life in the treatment and rehabilitation of leprosy patients and initiated a mobile leprosy treatment methodology, Clinic under the trees. On 13 September 1975, Government of Belgium honoured Hemerijckx by issuing a commemorative stamp, depicting his image. Hemerijckx, a Main-belt comet discovered in 1993 by Eric Walter Elst is named after the Flemish doctor.

Biography Frans Hemerijckx was born on 18 August 1902 at Ninove in the Flemish province of Belgium to Leonie Steenhoudt and Theofiel Hemerijckx, a candle manufacturer, as the eldest of their four children. He did his early education at St. Catherine's College, Geraardsbergen and secured a medical degree from the Catholic University of Leuven after which he specialized in tropical medicine at Brussels. Reaching there with his fiancé, Hemerijckx opened a Leprosy Centre in Tshumbe where patients could live with their families as the first step of rehabilitating them. a small village with high concentration of leprosy patients, near Kancheepuram in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu on 9 July 1955. a mobile medical service where the treatment was dispensed from makeshift camps set up under the trees. Hemerijckx carried on with the mobile service for five years till the local government took over the system in 1960, placing it under Claire Vellut. whose activities soon spread across the world and Claire Vellut founded the Damien Foundation Trust India in 1992. He died on 14 October 1969, at the age of 67, at Leuven, Belgium.