Pam Fessler

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. Aided by their heroic caretakers, patients rallied to find a cure for Hansen’s disease and to fight the insidious stigma that surrounded it. Kirkus Reviews called it “[A] fine history, by turns heartbreaking and infuriating […] Vignettes of the patients, some tracked over decades, humanize the story […] A caustic story told with empathy and a sharp eye for society’s intolerance.”