This was a great book to end the year on — compulsively readable, extremely grim, and a triumph to the power of the human spirit. I loved this book and read most of it out loud to my mom as I went, so it would probably make a great audiobook, too. On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers is, as the title describes, a travel narrative of Kate Marsden’s trip from England into the Siberian wilds to visit the lepers there. She was a British nurse who had decided to devote her life to trying to help lepers, and she had heard a rumor that there was an herb in Siberia that could cure leprosy. She sets out in 1891 to get to Siberia, and her descriptions of the difficulties of this journey are amazing. She goes through such trials and torments on this trip that her health was shattered afterwards and she never really recovered. What the lepers are going through is even worse, though, and she describes their horrible misery in great detail. The Yakult tribes would basically exile them to small huts where they lived in rags and filth, slowly dying and subsisting on milk and rotten fish.
To her credit, Marsden survived this journey and raised the money to build a hospital for the lepers. She is still regarded in the region as a hero and has a memorial and even a play made about her. In England, people accused her of making this up and the rumor (which was probably true) that she was a lesbian succeeded in ruining her reputation and getting her removed from the museum that she worked to build. She died an invalid in poverty in 1931. It made me very sad to research her afterwards and find that out, but this book and the work she did in Siberia to help the lepers have kept her memory around and I regard her as a true hero.