Dr. Ruth Pfau-Savior of Lepers in Pakistan and The Best Doctor Ever.

Dr Ruth Pfau, a German-born medical examiner who has been titled as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan” for her significant role in controlling leprosy there.

Ruth Katharina Martha Pfau, the fourth of five daughters, was born on Sept. 9, 1929, in Leipzig, in eastern Germany, to Walter and Martha Pfau.

She was inspired to become a doctor shortly after the World war II, when her baby brother became ill and died. She escaped from the Soviet Occupation Zone in 1948 and followed her father to Wiesbaden, in West Germany, to study gynecology at the University of Mainz and in Marburg.

At college, after meeting an elderly Christian concentration camp survivor who had devoted the rest of her life to preaching love and forgiveness, she rejected a marriage proposal from a fellow student.

Leprosy, a defacing disease also called as Hansen’s disease, can now be prevented and even cured after early diagnosis.

Less than four decades after Dr. Pfau started her campaign to limit leprosy, a transferable bacterial infection, the World Health Organization declared it under control in Pakistan in 1996, ahead of most other Asian countries (although several hundred new cases are still reported there annually).

Dr. Pfau, who had converted to Roman Catholicism and become a prioress, discovered her calling to help lepers coincidentally.

In 1960, she come to Pakistan by a passport foul-up when she was actually traveling to India. By chance, she visited a leper colony in Karachi, where she met one of the thousands of Pakistani patients distressed with the disease.

“He must have been my age — I was at this time not yet 30 — and he crawled on hands and feet into this dispensary, acting as if this was quite normal,” she told the BBC in 2010, “as if someone has to crawl there through that slime and dirt on hands and feet.

The encounter surprised her.

“I could not believe that humans could live in such conditions,” she told the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune in 2014. “That one visit, the sights I saw during it, made me make a key life decision.”

Dr. Pfau joined the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center, opened in 1956 in the Karachi slums. She soon transformed it into the hub of a network of 157 medical centers that treated tens of thousands of Pakistanis infected with leprosy.

Funded mostly by German, Austrian and Pakistani donors, the center and its satellite clinics also treated victims of the 2000 drought in Balochistan, the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and devastating floods in 2010.

Once leprosy was declared under control, the center also focused on tuberculosis, blindness and other diseases and on disabilities, some caused by land mines in war-torn Afghanistan.

Mervyn Lobo, the chief executive of the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center, said that Dr. Pfau had “played a dynamic role in removing the stigma attached to the healing of leprosy patients.”

Harald Meyer-Porzky, deputy chief executive of the German Leprosy and Tuberculosis Relief Foundation and a board member of the Ruth Pfau Foundation, said that she had “enabled hundreds of thousands of people to live with dignity.”

The German consulate in Karachi declared, “It was due to her endless struggle that Pakistan defeated leprosy.”

She arrived in Vellore, India, in 1961 for training, then returned to Pakistan to organize a leprosy-control program and, with Dr. Zarina Fazelbhoy, one of her many collaborators, a tutorial for paramedics.

She expressed hope that democracy would take hold in Pakistan.

Dr. Pfau wrote four books about her work in Pakistan, including “To Light a Candle” (1987), which was translated into English. In another book, she explained that she had no intention of ever retiring completely.

“I don’t use the word ‘retirement,’ ” she wrote. “It sounds as if you had completed everything, as if life was over and the world was in order.”

Her only wish was that she would not experience a violent death. (She died peacefully, and with no immediate survivors). She expressed no regrets about her life.

She died on Thursday in a hospital in Karachi at the age of 87.

Her death was announced by Prime Minister Shahid Abbasi, who said she would receive a state funeral. She had kidney and heart disease.

“Dr. Ruth came to Pakistan here at the dawn of a young nation, looking to make lives better for those afflicted by disease, and in doing so, found herself a home,” Mr. Shahid Abbasi said. Although she was born in Germany, he added, “her heart was always in Pakistan.”

Being a foreigner Dr Ruth Pfau was not arrogant at all. Secondly, she was to devoted to her noble profession that she did not go to see her mother for the last time when her mother passed away. She went in search of her patients to her houses too and she thought her patients need her more and she needs them. Some people come in this world as blessing just like Dr. Ruth Pfau. She is surely a role model for the most of the youth who aims to serve the country as a good doctor. Hope this German-Pakistani doctor who was the symbol of selflessness and devotion will inspire You. THANK YOU!