Lepers' Haven

Some 60 miles north of New Orleans, a mud road strays off from the main highway, cuts through rich, sombre swampland I down to the green levees girdling the Mississippi. There, hidden in an elbow of the I river, far from the nearest village, stands a white-columned plantation house. Guarding the house are two gigantic oaks, shrouded in ghostly Spanish moss. The cottages behind the oaks might belong to sugarcane workers or tenant farmers. But the 367 men & women who live at Carville cut no cane, plough no field. They are lepers.

In the Middle Ages lepers were dreaded and shunned, were forced to wear white capes and jangle warning bells. But in the U. S. today they are the favorite patients of the U. S. Public Health Service. Each leper at the Carville hospital has a private room and an abundance of savory food, costs the Health Service $3 a day. For Carville lepers are the last carriers of a mysterious malady that is fast disappearing from the U. S.

Master of Carville is blue-eyed, white-thatched Dr. Hermon Erwin Hasseltine.Shy in company, but bold in his laboratory, Dr. Hasseltine has traveled from Alaska to Hawaii exploring such rare diseases as hydrophobia, undulant fever, psittacosis (parrot fever)--which he has twice come down with. An authority on leprosy, at 58 he still devotes all his spare hours to research.

Carvilte. Only leprosarium in the U. S., Carville has sheltered 1,200 patients since the first inmates were carried to its damp slave huts one dark night in 1894. Today, patients live in 45 wooden houses arranged around a quadrangle and linked by roofed plank platforms. These cottages, soon to be torn down, will be replaced by two-story fireproof houses. Last week construction workers started on a recreation building. For the rebuilding of Carville, the U. S. Public Health Service last year appropriated $4,100,000.

So smooth and peaceful is life at Carville that several patients, who recovered 15 or 20 years ago, still stay on, working around the grounds or the infirmary.

Lepers with purplish, corrugated, lion-like faces stroll in the sunshine or pick fruit from the heavy fig trees; others with faces eaten away into white, featureless masks slap through the corridors in their bedroom slippers. Men with ulcerated feet pedal bicycles up & down the platforms, sometimes waving a bandaged, fingerless hand at their friends, or stopping at the recreation hall to play poker. On fair days some of the patients play golf, tennis or baseball.The half-dozen children go to a one-room school, and the women--who are far outnumbered by the men--spend most of their time sewing pink and blue organdy curtains for their cottages.

Few lepers ever try to escape. But Dr.Hasseltine is often plagued by hysterical women who drive up to the white plantation house and beg for admission, insisting that they are lepers. Another strange fact: whenever Dr. Hasseltine has a vacancy in his army of 200 laundresses, bakers, cooks and carpenters, he is swamped with applications.

In the centre of Carville's grounds stands the new, yellow infirmary for sick lepers (they catch colds, get bellyaches like ordinary people) and those about to die. The staff consists of four doctors, --a dentist, a corps of rustling, rosy-cheeked Sisters of Charity. Busiest clinic is the eye, ear, nose and throat room, for many lepers are blind and almost all have some kind of respiratory obstruction, often need tubes set in their tight throats to keep from choking. Occasionally some plastic surgery is done, but it is seldom successful. Last year a patient whose nose had been gradually absorbed into his bloodstream was fitted with a handsome artificial nose of copper; in a few months that too was absorbed.

Diagnosis. First signs of leprosy are small, innocent-looking white patches or nodes on cheeks, nose or ears. Later the patches may spread to other parts of the body, swell to thick, yellow ulcers. After 15 or 20 years the disease may eat away nerves and bones. Although leprosy develops slowly and secretly, a sharp medical sleuth can easily spot it. For the leprosy germ is a delicate devil shaped like a pointed rod, the Mycobacterium leprae. To confirm a hunch, a doctor need only scrape a bit of tissue from the lining of the nose, a nodule or pale patch, stain it, examine it under the microscope.

Contagion. In the U. S. leprosy is one of the "feeblest" of contagious diseases, far less infectious than tuberculosis. But in tropical lands, it spreads like wildfire, still claims some 3,000,000 victims throughout the world. With the exception of Molokai's famed Father Damien and a few other workers, practically no doctors or nurses have ever become lepers. The disease is not inherited, but babies are very susceptible, may catch it from their parents. Most of the thousand victims in the U. S. are aliens, and a good 500 of them have only a mild form, go about their business with no danger to anybody. Most of Carville's inmates are Hawaiians, Filipinos, Chinese.

Treatment. In spite of optimistic claims, there is no specific treatment or cure for leprosy. At Carville, Dr. Hasseltine gives his patients capsules or injections of chaulmoogra oil, which comes from seeds of a tree in Burma. Although the oil has arrested the disease in some cases, its value, according to Dr. Hasseltine, is chiefly psychological. Other soothing treatments: warm & cold baths, X-ray and sun-lamp applications. As hands & feet decay and die, they must be amputated. Often lepers develop mold diseases, cancer, tuberculosis, kidney infections, which all need separate care. Some cases of leprosy disappear as mysteriously as they arise; in the last ten years 150 fortunate patients have left Carville.

Many specialists believe that leprosy will fade out in northern climates before a cure is found. Since the lepra bacillus will grow in no other animal but man, it is impossible to control leprosy experiments in a laboratory.

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