Publishers Weekly
04/27/2020
NPR correspondent Fessler’s polished and compassionate debut examines the history of Hansen’s disease (the modern name for leprosy) in America through the story of the Louisiana Leper Home in Carville, La. In the 1890s, New Orleans dermatologist Isadore Dyer established the quarantine facility for leprosy patients on the grounds of a defunct sugar plantation. In 1921, the U.S. Public Health Service took over Carville (as it was called by locals), making it the only national leprosarium in America. Fessler profiles several patients (most of whom were sent to Carville by mandatory state reporting laws), including her husband’s grandfather, and New Orleans debutante Betty Parker, who fell in love with a fellow patient and ran away with him. Fessler also documents the 1941 discovery that the antibiotic promin could be effective in treating Hansen’s disease, and notes that by the 1980s additional medicines had slowed new outbreaks and made most cases manageable. Carville’s planned shutdown was delayed until 1999, Fessler writes, because many remaining patients had nowhere else to go. Her well-researched and articulate account humanizes sufferers and caregivers alike, and offers hope in the medical field’s ability to halt the spread of contagious illness. Readers will be enlightened and encouraged. Agent: Gail Ross, the Ross Yoon Agency. (July)
Booklist - Tony Miksanek
"Fessler presents inspiring and tragic stories of patients who mostly experienced Carville as a prison, sometimes a sanctuary.... Heartbreaking and infuriating."
David Scollard
"By turns heart-wrenching, inspiring, and infuriating, this is a fast-paced and highly readable account of attempts by patients, their families, doctors and American society in general to deal with the worlds’ most misunderstood disease. Written with the eye of an experienced journalist and the voice of a novelist, this book tells the story—stranger than fiction—of the patients, nuns, doctors, movie stars, and politicians who have struggled to come to terms with the stigma and discrimination attached to leprosy. The book is painstakingly researched and documented, and unfolds dramatically through the words of the patients and other participants through their letters and personal papers as well as newspaper accounts and interviews."
David Maraniss
"Pam Fessler’s powerful book combines fascinating medical history with a deeply moving family story about a disease that has been misunderstood and stigmatized since the Old Testament."
Susan Stamberg
"NPR journalist Pam Fessler has put her considerable professional and personal skills to work, unmasking the history and stigma of this ancient disease. That stigma, which lingers despite scientific evidence, dissipates with this book. Fessler’s skills as a journalist and humanist shine new light on old terrors, with well-told stories of lives and science."
Meredith Wadman
"Behind barbed wire on a onetime sugar plantation on the Louisiana bayou, generations of Americans who had the bad luck to contract leprosy were forcibly confined by their own government, stripped of their most basic rights, and left to suffer and die. Pam Fessler, by shining a light on their stories—including a surprising family connection of her own—has redeemed them. She has also left us with a sobering reminder of the costs of demonizing disease and provided a must-read for this time of new infectious threats."
James Carville
"Throughout my professional life, I’ve traveled to many places and at many times tried to explain Carville to people around the world. Compared to Pam’s efforts mine were feeble. This is an excellent story of my hometown."
Ron Klain
"Carville’s Cure is a powerful story of all the ways that infectious diseases bring out the best and the worst in people: hope and fear, science and faith, humanity and cruelty. It is the very best kind of history: one that is alive with the people whose story it tells, and one that teaches us how to face challenges we will face in the future. It will move you."
Marcia G. Welsh
"Fessler [makes] the residents, and their doctors and the Daughters of Charity nuns who cared for them, come alive in this telling. The treatment of those living with Hansen’s Disease has had a quiet and shameful history, but Fessler allows for people’s voices to be heard in their own words. A heart-wrenching story of little-known social history."
E.J. Dionne
"Pam Fessler's extraordinary knack for storytelling brings home the shameful history of discrimination and exile of those battling leprosy. At the same time, she lifts up the resilience and humanity of a community largely erased from our history. It's a moving and passionate appeal to our consciences."
Wall Street Journal - Laura Kolbe
"[F]ascinating.... A remarkable and vivid case study for exploring issues of patients’ rights, the ethics of clinical research and the notorious American tradition of intermingling concerns about disease with anxieties about immigration and the proper scope of public-welfare management.... Ms. Fessler’s meticulously researched account illuminates the endless ways, large and small, in which those confined to Carville sought to determine the shape of their own lives."
Library Journal
07/01/2020
NPR commentator Fessler's father-in-law's father contracted Hansen's Disease (leprosy) as a soldier in the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War. He returned to New York to start his own business, marry, and raise a family, but eventually the slow-growing disease attacked his nerves, making his fingers and feet numb, and robbed his eyesight. Finally, after consulting a doctor, he, like many others living with Hansen's Disease, was taken away from his home by public officials, isolated, and brought to the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, at one time the only leprosarium in the continental U.S. Here, Fessler tells "the story of the thousands of patients, families, and caregivers in the U.S. who struggled against one of the world's most dreaded and misunderstood diseases." In 2004, Marcia Gaudet published Carville, but Fessler had access to more research and archives, making the residents, and their doctors and the Daughters of Charity nuns who cared for them, come alive in this telling. The treatment of those living with Hansen's Disease has had a quiet and shameful history, but Fessler allows for people's voices to be heard in their own words. VERDICT A heart-wrenching story of little-known social history.—Marcia G. Welsh, Dartmouth Coll. Lib., Hanover, NH
Kirkus Reviews
2020-04-12
A social and medical history of Louisiana’s leprosarium, the only such operation in the continental U.S. during the 20th century.
From 1894 until 1999, on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, stood the Louisiana Leper Home, later known as Carville. This is the story of the patients, families, and caregivers who contended with Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy, one of the world’s most dreaded and misunderstood illnesses. In this fine history, by turns heartbreaking and infuriating, NPR correspondent Fessler begins with the ramshackle sugar plantation that was chosen to house the nation’s leprotic population and then moves on to the nature and progress of the disease—in particular, the societal perception of leprosy, which hasn’t changed much from its biblical depiction “as God’s way of punishing sinners by condemning them to a life of suffering and scorn.” This stigma has always clung to those with the disease, and it has been used as a convenient justification for prejudice against immigrants. “Asian immigrants, already a target for those who believed they were taking Americans’ jobs, were especially suspect,” writes the author. Without descending into melodrama, Fessler paints a clear picture of a class of people who were confined at Carville typically for life, isolated, stripped of their identities (since it might cause backlashes against their families) and their civil rights. The author also shows how Carville became a refuge for its patients as well as a rare integrated institution in the Jim Crow South. Vignettes of the patients, some tracked over decades, humanize the story, as does the depiction of the Daughters of Charity, who cared for the patients and “would prove to be some of [their] strongest allies in their fight for more freedom and rights.” Fessler also follows medical developments to treat the disease, which still has the same old stigmas of discrimination, superstition, and ignorance.
A caustic story told with empathy and a sharp eye for society’s intolerances. (8 pages of b/w illustrations)
