In Conversation: Public Health & an American Leprosarium’s History

Pam Fessler is a correspondent with NPR News, where she covers poverty, philanthropy, and voting issues. In her reporting at NPR, Fessler does stories on homelessness, hunger, affordable housing, and income inequality. She reports on what non-profit groups, the government, and others are doing to reduce poverty and how those efforts are working. In Carville’s Cure: Leprosy, Stigma, and the Fight for Justice (Liveright) Fessler tells the story of Carville, an old sugar plantation on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the site of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States. Generations of afflicted Americans were isolated there, often against their will and until their deaths. Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, Fessler unearthed a lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen’s disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights—denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children. Neighbors fretted over their presence and newspapers warned of their dangerous condition, which was seen as a biblical “curse” rather than a medical diagnosis. Yet patients made Carville more a refuge than a prison, carving out meaningful lives behind the barbed-wire fence that surrounded them. Though Jim Crow reigned in the South and racial animus prevailed elsewhere, Carville took in people of all faiths, colors, and backgrounds.

Perri Klass is a professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University, codirector of NYU Florence, and national medical director of Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit that incorporates reading into pediatric care. She writes the weekly column The Checkup for the New York Times. Only one hundred years ago, in even the world’s wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers—of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O’Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s four children, only one survived to adulthood, and the first billionaire in history, John D. Rockefeller, lost his beloved grandson to scarlet fever. The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. In A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future (W. W. Norton & Company) Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. For the first time in human memory, early death is now the exception rather than the rule. David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Polio: A History, praised Klass as she