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Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America. By Marcia Gaudet. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Pp. xvii + 221, foreword, preface, 16 photographs, one map, two appendices, endnotes, bibliography, index.)
From 1894 to 1999, Carville, Louisiana, was the site of the only in-patient facility in the contiguous United States for treating Hansen's disease, historically known as leprosy. Because of the high incidence of Hansen's disease in southern Louisiana, locating the facility in a former plantation between New Orleans and Baton Rouge made sense. The patients there, in quarantine until the 1960s, constituted a community that was rich in narratives and traditions resulting from the intersection of their common malady with the usual benchmarks of life. In all, they narrate "a story of survival and a quest for dignity" (p. 4).
The first chapter of Marcia Gaudet's Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America introduces the history of the disease, both in scientific terms and in the popular consciousness, and presents Carville as a treatment center and a community. Chapter 2, "An Exile in My Own Country: The Unspeakable Trauma of Entering Carville," relates memories of the emotional devastation accompanying diagnosis and then analyzes both how the patients chose to voice those memories...