[7] Mouritz studied how leprosy was spread through experiments on hundreds of native Hawaiians.
[5] He and his colleagues received international and long-standing notoriety for their experimental inoculation of leprosy into apparently healthy people.
[1][5][8] To justify his experiments, Mouritz stated that Hawaiians were the only race not disgusted by leprosy symptoms.
[6][note 1] He posed that the bacteria summoned a fermentogen that was only available in susceptible humans, which fed the leprosy.
[1][5][8] Instead of being moved to free the residents of the isolated leper colony so they could return home to their communities, he justified keeping them confined because he was disgusted by their ugliness.