Perhaps my most life-changing essay I ever wrote concerned the National Hansen’s Disease Treatment Center, the clinic in Carville, La., devoted since 1894 to the care of leprosy patients.
The facility’s director, staff and patients inspired photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg and me.
So much was going on during our visit. After Ronald Reagan’s administration cuts shuttered three federal leprosy hospitals, many patients transferred to Carville. There had been talk for a year about Fidel Castro shipping lepers from Cuba to Carville. Not enough was known about leprosy. Estimates of those afflicted with Hansen’s Disease ranged anywhere from 10 to 20 million. Those with it hid the disease from family and coworkers due to the stigma.
How shameful we humans can be when we label others. Carville once was reviled by Louisianans as a “pest house.”
Max and I had access inside and outside the hospital. We saw patients playing golf and softball, met the editor (a patient) of the hospital newsletter, and schmoozed with other patients. We shadowed the Daughters of Charity caregivers. The institution served as an extended family for patients. Indeed, for some, it was their only family. Some patients, after admittance, never had a visitor.
The highlight of my visit was an extended interview with Rear Admiral John R. Trautman, M.D., the chief of the Carville Public Health Services Hospital. He was in his dress whites.
Although it has been four decades, I remember Trautman’s compassion, his optimism that a cure for leprosy would be found, and his willingness to answer any question I posed.
Many of Trautman’s dreams for patients came true. The disease became treatable with antibiotics. Much of the public’s fear of “unclean” lepers — going back to the time of Leviticus 13:43 — has disappeared.
“Please don’t refer to us as victims,” one middle-aged female patient said to me. “Do I look like a victim?”
She did not. She bubbled.
As Max and I left Carville in my pickup truck, we agreed on one thing.
We had so many blessings, but despite them, we often made sniveling complaints.
Our sniveling had to stop.
Thus, Carville was as life-affirming as anything I ever experienced.
The National Hansen’s Disease Museum in Carville closed in 2005 and reopened on June 2, 2022. It is open on Thursdays and Fridays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.