Clarence Perry Burgess (October 12, 1886, Joplin, Missouri – September 15, 1962, Unionville, Ohio) was an American minister, fundraiser, writer, and authority on leprosy.
Over the next few years he raised money to support Wilfred Grenfell's work in Newfoundland and to feed German children.
[1] In 1925 he met Dorothy Paul Wade, the wife of Dr. H. W. Wade, chief medical officer of the Culion leper colony in the Philippines; she had been asked by Major-General Leonard Wood, Governor-General of the Philippines, to raise money for new buildings and for research into a cure for leprosy.
Burgess travelled extensively to observe leprosaria worldwide, published articles in popular and scientific journals about leprosy, and in 1940 wrote the novel "Who Walk Alone" about a fictional American soldier who contracts leprosy while in the Philippines and becomes a resident of the Culion leper colony.
[4] They lived on the "Erie Vista" estate in Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio which had been the home of Cora's grandfather.