The Leper Spy

by Ben Montgomery

  When another patient asked Cynthia if Joey was her mother, she responded, “Who? This girl? She is my sister.” On another occasion, after Joey’s name and photograph were in the newspaper several days in a row, Cynthia said, “See this? The girl of the headlines!”

  Cynthia would remember the visits for the rest of her life, remember how her mother was always in good spirits, even if Cynthia could tell she was physically sick. Her mother had managed to get a room of her own, and it was by then filling with books. Joey loved to read and shelved any book she could get her hands on. She helped other inmates at Tala Leprosarium as well, including a leprosy victim who had given birth. The baby girl was healthy and did not have the disease. Joey became so attached that she pulled her husband aside one day and made a bold suggestion. He should adopt the child.

  Renato eventually agreed, and they took the baby into their home. Cynthia, who was being raised in large part by her father and grandmother, now had a sister, Jennifer.

  Renato did not explain much to Cynthia about her mother’s illness, just that she was sick and had to be isolated. The ignorance didn’t assuage the sadness Cynthia felt. She missed her mother. The visits were never long enough. Her father cried for her. He wasn’t expecting a miracle, but he was aware of the recent success of new drugs, still elusive in postwar Manila.

  Joey, meanwhile, was trying to bring attention to the abysmal conditions at the leprosarium. “There was no medicine. The cottages were filthy,” she would later say. “I was sick in my stomach. But I couldn’t sit around and do nothing about it.”

  Joey won the confidence of the other patients at Tala. Then she started cleaning. She scrubbed the floors and disinfected the sinks. She enlisted the aid of women she knew on the outside. She wrote more letters to new friends in the United States. The patients at Carville sent as much as they could.

  She appealed to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which promised to set up running water and electricity.

  She was shocked to learn that when patients died, they weren’t buried in coffins. The other patients didn’t have the spirit or energy to build a coffin, so Joey did it herself. It was a crude thing and not well constructed, but it was a solid box.

  Rev. Calvert Alexander, editor of a publication called Jesuit Missions, was on an around-the-world trip to visit all Jesuit establishments when he stopped at Tala. He found Joey acting as sacristan of the colony’s chapel. She also served as bell ringer and catechist, and when priests were unable to come in time, she baptized the dying and read the burial prayers at their graves. Alexander sent a dispatch to the National Catholic Welfare Council news service, describing Joey as “the most colorful and unforgettable character in post-war Philippines.” He wrote that she lived by a simple doctrine: “Our Lord suffered, so did Our Lady and all the saints; we must do the same, gaily and joyfully, if we want to make a worthwhile contribution to our fellow men and to our peace and happiness.”

  She appealed to a friend and former schoolmate, Maria Aurora “Baby” Quezon, daughter of the former president Manuel Quezon. The two leaned on friends at the Manila Times, and eventually a newspaperman agreed to take a trip with Quezon to Tala, to see for himself. It wasn’t long before the whole country would know Tala’s secret.

  31

  IN SICKNESS

  In May 1946, Gertrude Hornbostel, who had been held captive at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp for three long years, began to notice slight numbness of the hands and strange blemishes on her arms, legs, and body. She learned she had Hansen’s disease in San Francisco. She was placed in an isolation ward at Letterman General Hospital but had one constant visitor, her husband, Maj. Hans Hornbostel.

  The tall, broad-shouldered man wouldn’t leave his wife’s side, and when medical authorities decided to ship Gertrude to the nation’s leprosarium at Carville for treatment, Hans decided he would go, too. His résumé lent a certain surety to his decision. The major had been serving with an army demolition squad when the Japanese overran the Philippines four years before, and he had been captured on Bataan. He survived the death march and was imprisoned for the remainder of the war in a POW camp in Cabanatuan, sixty-five miles north of where his wife was interned. Finally reunited, he wasn’t about to leave her side.

  Their story, and his persistence to live the rest of his years with the woman he loved, made national news. The headlines were sensational. Newspapers couldn’t resist the shock value of the word leper, still in use for the “dread disease.” The San Francisco Call-Bulletin broke the story, headlined S.F. WIFE LEPER: ARMY MATE BEGS TO SHARE ISOLATION FOR LIFE. Major Hornbostel made no secret of his wife’s affliction, which was a rare departure. Most patients at Carville even registered under fake names so their families wouldn’t face repercussions from the ignorant. Those at Carville knew that great strides had been made in research and that doctors were finding major success with sulfone drugs, in use for six years by then. They despised the way in which many in the press continued to view leprosy, epitomized by a well-intentioned editorial in the Springfield (MA) Union a few days after the Hornbostel story broke on the other coast.

  For centuries this loathsome and dreadful disease has rendered its victims outcasts and untouchables. Major Hornbostel is ready to leave the outside world with its accustomed comforts, its safety, its cleanliness behind him to enter that dark place which brings to mind that ominous word “unclean.” To be with his wife, he is ready to run the risk himself becoming a leper. If this man is allowed to join his wife, he will bring the colony of the doomed a luminous spirit of love and sacrifice which will not only help make existence happier for his life’s companion, but also give some measure of inspiration to the other victims.

  Doomed. Dark. Unclean.

  The Hornbostels knew better. Gertrude called the poppycock a “melodramatic mess.” In fifty-two years of the Carville hospital’s existence, there had never been a known case of transmission to a doctor or nurse. And doctors were having excellent results with three sulfa drugs: Promin, Diasone, and Promizole. The year before, the leprosarium discharged thirty-seven patients, with plans to discharge forty or more in 1946.

  Dr. Guy H. Faget, medical chief at Carville, was reporting that the sulfones had “stopped even the most hopeless cases in their tracks.”

  On the strength of the new treatments, the newly created National Advisory Council on Leprosy was preparing recommendations for a more humane policy of treatment for victims. They were planning to encourage the US surgeon general to establish new diagnostic centers and clinics for treatment in the four states where leprosy is endemic—California, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. They also were planning to recommend segregation as a last resort and to appeal for better facilities and more freedom for patients at Carville. Even though most of Carville’s patients were dealing with advanced stages of leprosy, heavy daily injections of Promin were known to clear out the bacilli swiftly. It typically took between eighteen months and five years to suppress the disease.

  But culture had been slow to change. Every state but New York required segregation of lepers. Patients at Carville were still called “inmates.” Hospital staff sterilized their outgoing letters. Patients could not leave of their own free will, and family members who weren’t afflicted were barred from living on the hospital campus.

  Hans Hornbostel felt like his only chance to be with his wife of thirty-three years was blunt talk with reporters. Instead of treating the diagnosis as something to be kept secret, he was unafraid and unashamed. He called a press conference to plea for the right to live with his wife. He tried to correct reporters when they suggested his wife caught the disease at Santo Tomas, suggesting instead that she likely contracted it much earlier and the disease revealed itself due to malnourishment and stress.

  “I don’t consider myself any martyr by asking to be with her as long as we both shall live,” he said. “I’d be unhappy without her and she’d be unhappy without me, and that’s all there is to it.”r />
  He appealed to his friend, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who cabled from Tokyo, “I heartily endorse your desire to be with your wife.” He appealed to the US Public Health Service, which suggested he get a job at Carville to ensure he could at least visit her every day.

  “I’ve done a lot of things in my life,” Hans told reporters. “I’ve written stories; I’ve been a mine superintendent; I’ve been an explorer and a department head; and I’ve served in the army and the Marine Corps; I’ve been a forester and a chief of police—and I see no reason why I shouldn’t be damned good at kitchen police or even a missionary.”

  They’d married in Guam in 1913, and the war years were the only three they’d been apart.

  “He says he’s had his fling in life and that he wants to be with me,” Gertrude said from her hospital room, which was filled with roses. “I want him to come with me.”

  “I just want one thing in my life: to be with my wife,” the major said. “It’s not unselfish of me.”

  When Gertrude was transferred to Carville, her husband followed her and followed the rules without a fuss. He bought her a little cottage on the hospital campus and found himself a place not too far away, and he visited every day from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Thousands of letters and telegrams poured in for Gertrude, and she answered each of them, enlightening her correspondents on Hansen’s disease. She also began writing a column in the patient newsletter, which was circulated coast to coast by subscription. In her column, called As I See It, she challenged the hospital administration’s policies. In one, she quoted the Hippocratic Oath: “Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I may see or hear in the lives of men which ought not to be spoken abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that such should be kept secret.” Then she asked:

  Are doctors connected with the Public Health Service exempt from the above? Or perhaps I should say: Is the patient who is committed to this hospital beyond the pale protection which the Hippocratic Oath gives, because this is a federal institution? Should a patient’s private affairs, feelings, and personal symptoms become public property, to be bandied about the grounds of this institution and in the country’s press?

  In the first place … we have no private consultation room in this hospital for monthly check-ups. When the patient wants to tell the doctor something that should be told in private, he (or she) cannot do so because … he is separated from the doctor’s office by a chain, with the whole room behind him full of other patients who can listen in. This becomes at times embarrassing, with the result that some patients keep putting off their troubles until it is too late.

  Secondly, I consider it unethical to bring press representatives to clinics without the specific consent of the patients to be interviewed, as was done in the case of the AP story of Jimmie and his family. These patients were under the impression that the man taking notes was just another doctor.

  While many patients simply accepted their lot as a voiceless victim-inmate, the Hornbostels stood up for themselves as well as the others, fighting the system when the time was right.

  Hans accepted invitations to speaking engagements, fought to get the Louisiana legislature to give voting rights to the disenfranchised Carville patients, and railed against the rules under which his wife now lived, especially the loss of freedom.

  “My wife lived in a Jap prison camp behind a barbed wire fence for three years,” he said hotly. “And now she has a fence around her for a couple more years. There’s no reason for that fence around the colony. These people aren’t criminals. It’s the most damnable thing I ever heard of. The state of Louisiana is treating these intelligent, good American people like so many criminals or insane.”

  He penned a bylined story, which ran in newspapers across the country, for the Associated Press, pointing out that “ignorance and prejudice cause infinitely more suffering than the disease itself.” He pledged to dedicate the rest of his life to “trying to correct the wrong that is done lepers.”

  Indirectly, the unprecedented media attention generated by the Hornbostel case showed millions of Americans that leprosy was still an issue and that there was a place called Carville where human beings who happened to have a disease were being treated as prisoners.

  32

  INDEPENDENCE

  Manila was still in rubble, and the stench of death still filled the nostrils of the living. Its residents still walked down bomb-blasted streets and stood on wrecked corners and told stories about stolen watches and stolen wives, about seeing guts on guava trees and the layers of burning tires and bodies. The victors counted 1,000 American dead, along with some 16,665 Japanese and more than 100,000 residents of Manila. By May 1946, Irene Murphy, head of the Private Philippine War Relief Mission, had tallied that 10,000 Filipinos had died of starvation since the war’s end, mostly in the northern Luzon mountains. She predicted another 50,000 would die unless relief came.

  War had refused to subside long after Gen. Douglas MacArthur had declared victory. So, too, had the debate about whether MacArthur should have been so insistent on taking the Philippines at such a high human cost. “Those who had survived Japanese hate did not survive American love,” wrote Carmen Guerrero, whose husband had been shot and who saw her aunt beheaded. “Both were equally deadly, the latter more so because [it was] sought and longed for.”

  But on July 4, 1946, the criticism was hard to find. Sirens screamed and church bells rang and Filipinos hustled down Dewey Boulevard. Dignitaries from fifty nations and more than two hundred thousand Filipinos gathered in their best clothes at the Queen City’s broad green Luneta, overlooking the bay, crowded with bobbing ships representing the world’s commerce.

  MacArthur would take the ship-shaped stage, in front of a statue of hero and revolutionary Jose Rizal, followed by Manuel Roxas, fifty-four, the first president of the first official Republic of the Philippines. The American flag would come down in a sweltering wave of emotion over the field not far from Intramuros, replaced by the Philippine national emblem, a sun with three stars. New soldiers would march in new boots.

  Through rolling rain showers, the masses would witness the culmination of Manifest Destiny, the end of a disappointing forty-eight-year adventure in American colonialism seven thousand miles from the West Coast. Or at least the pretense of the end.

  Magellan discovered the Philippines for Spain and the white man in 1521, and now, four hundred years later, after teaching missionary priests, after the gold, pearl, and hemp trade, after wars between the Spanish and the Dutch and the Spanish and the British, after revolution and assassination and American occupation, the Philippines were finally being granted independence, the first time in history an imperial nation relinquished a possession. American influence had left a little jazz, a love of fast cars, decent schools and American industry, and some impervious infrastructure. But gone were the docks and airfields and country clubs. Gone was the Manila Hotel and the sugar-cake houses of the wealthy. Gone was the national economy, the export trade, and half the carabao population, on which farmers staked their livelihoods. Next to Warsaw, Manila was the world’s most destroyed city. Now the newest and poorest nation on earth needed help to survive its very first month.

  Paul McNutt, the retiring US high commissioner and the first US ambassador to the Philippine Republic, read a statement from President Truman: “The United States of America hereby withdraws and surrenders all rights, possession, supervision, jurisdiction, and control of sovereignty now existing and exercised by the United States of America in and over the territory and people of the Philippines and on behalf of the United States I do hereby recognize the independence of the Philippines as a separate self-governing nation and acknowledge the authority and control over the same by the Government instituted by the people thereof under the Constitution now in force.

  “A nation is born,” he said. “Long live the Republic of the Philippines! May God bless and prosper the Filipino people and keep them safe and free.”


  MacArthur, greeted by a standing ovation as he took the stage, said, “Let history record this event in the sweep of democracy through the earth as foretelling the end of the mastery of peoples by the power of force alone—the end of empire as a political chain which binds the unwilling weak to the unyielding strong.”

  Roxas called American friendship “the greatest ornament of our independence.”

  “Any doubts which may still linger in some quarters of the earth as to the benign intentions of America should be resolved by what she so nobly and unselfishly accomplished here,” he said. “Subtract the influence of the United States from the rest of the world and the answer is chaos.”

  The Philippines Free Press echoed the sentiments of the loyal and fiercely jealous islanders: “There are great days in the lives of all peoples—red-letter days, epoch-making days immortalized in verse and story and figured bronze and sculptured marble—days enshrined in the human heart and commemorated in joyous celebration or solemn observance,” read the lead editorial. “Such a day has come to the Filipino people, bearing on its wings that idolized and cherished word—INDEPENDENCE.”

  33

  SPOTLIGHT

  The headline ran above the fold in the broadsheet Manila Times on January 18, 1947, a full eighteen months after Joey’s letter found its way to Miss Marie Dachauer in Sacramento. The exposé was written by A. H. Lacson, a former Ateneo student and guerrilla scout.

  ATROCIOUS CONDITIONS IN LEPER CAMP

  Filth, misery, starvation, and inhuman conditions in general exist in the government leprosarium at Novaliches, Rizal, about 15 miles northeast of Manila, according to persons who joined a group headed by Miss Aurora Quezon that visited the place yesterday. Among those in the group were a United States Army chaplain and a nurse.

  There are 650 lepers living in unspeakable conditions in that “graveyard of the living dead,” according to one of the visitors, and this, he said, is due to official neglect and public indifference.