Customer Reviews

Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America

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This book deserves a more intensive review than this, but it also deserves to be read,so I will at least share some random reflections on it. Carville is the name of a small community in south Louisiana. It is also a euphemism for the location of the hospital that for more than 100 years treated patients with leprosy (preferably called Hansen's disease.) As such Carville was a place of mystery and curiosity. Marcia Gaudet's new book of recollections takes the mystery out of the place and shows it to be the home of an intensely courageous group of people, stigmatized for their condition but never defeated. The book which has much to offer to the scholar and the lay reader alike records the memories of trauma and grief that Hansen's disease patients endured. But the book does not stop with trauma. It relates the formation and growth of a community with its own traditions (escaping through the hole in the fence), celebrations (Mardi Gras) and tall tales. For anyone with even a casual interest in the lives of people in intensely painful situations the book is an inspiration and a must read.

With a natural wonder for all things morbid and the inner lives of people that struggle, I was curious to know the details about leprosy as a disease and also about the personal details of the people that suffered with it. This book gave enough scientific facts about the disease to quench my curiousity, and also managed to give a personal perspective, delving into the details of the lives of, and even quoting, victims of the disease that lived when leprosy was still misunderstood greatly. I read the entire book, then ordered, "The Colony", a book about a leper colony that existed on an island in Hawaii. I found that book very dry, as it traced the character's lives very factually. It was so much like a history book that I couldn't even make it quite half way through.

Gaudet's book fails to tell us very much about the day to day lives of Carville's patients. Granted, she does relate stories about the Mardi Gras parade and about sneaking off the grounds (I was surprised by the largely positive reactions of the outside community). But time after time, I would read a passage and want to know more. After finishing the book, I hardly had any more knowledge about Hansen's Disease and the Carville experience than I had before I began reading it.

I have been aware of the Carville facility since I read Betty Martin's "Miracle at Carville" as a child, and was delighted to learn about 10 years ago that at that time, she was still living. The book was very respectful of her privacy, not revealing her real name even though she died in 2002.

It was a superficial history of the facility and its newsletter, "The Star", which probably did more to promote knowledge about this interesting disease than anything else.