Dr Ernest Woodward Price MD, FRCSE, DTM&H, OBE (20 July 1907  – 31 January 1990) was a missionary doctor, orthopaedic surgeon, leprosy specialist and the discoverer of podoconiosis, one of the neglected tropical diseases.

He was at Pimu Hospital,[4] Province of Équateur until 1946, most of the time as the only doctor there (TLM, The Leprosy Mission started working there in 1944).

[5] Although Belgium had been invaded by the Nazis, the Belgian government in exile in London continued to control the Congo and its valuable resources.

), now American Baptist International Ministries), which already had a medical aide training school, and where he was tasked with helping to build Kimpese hospital.

[8] A Protestant hospital at Kimpese had first been mooted in 1923 (there had been an Evangelical training Institute there since 1909[9]), but was strongly resisted by the Roman Catholic Church.

After the war this policy was reversed by the Socialist governments of Achille Van Acker and Protestant establishments were subsidised on the same basis as Catholic ones.

[14] Another doctor, who worked at Pimu as a BMS missionary in the 1980s, was Adrian Hopkins, later famous as an ophthalmologist and specialist in onchocerciasis (river blindness).

[21] However the distinguished Indian leprologist Hariharan Srinivasan, writing in 1968, gave Price sole credit for elucidating the cause of plantar ulcers, not mentioning Paul Brand.

[22] Price's African patients walked barefoot and he found that wearing soles made of wood could prevent the recurrence of these ulcers, once they had been healed.

He then became chief of the Leprosy Control Project, Imperial Ethiopian Ministry of Public Health, Addis Ababa, though still maintaining other responsibilities.

As the famous leprologist Stanley George Browne wrote: "Earlier attempts had been made to treat people without disrupting their daily lives.

His efforts to elucidate the cause of this problem continued after he retired from Ethiopia in 1974, and shortly before he died his extensive monograph on this topic was accepted for publication.