The Leper Spy

by Ben Montgomery

  The Associated Press dispatch would run in papers across the country under the headline HEROINE AT LEPROSARIUM.

  Mrs. Josefina Guerrero, who was known as Joey to the countless G.I.s she helped fight the Japanese in her native Philippines, arrived at the Carville National Leprosarium here today. She is the first foreigner ever to be accepted as a patient.

  Mrs. Guerrero’s journey to Carville had a dramatic touch early today. The plane carrying her from San Francisco hovered for 45 minutes over Harding Field at Baton Rouge, unable to land because of fog. It flew finally to New Orleans where a Carville ambulance met the heroine and brought her to the hospital here.

  Mrs. Guerrero was permitted to enter the United States only after a special ruling from Attorney General Tom Clark. She was earlier unable to get a visa to leave Manila because the United States immigration laws ban the entry of lepers into this country.

  “Being at Carville is like a homecoming,” she told one reporter. “I feel that we all met before because of our long correspondence.”

  To another she introduced a Chinese doll she was carrying. “I have had her since I was in high school and look at her, how worn she is getting,” she said as she picked at her breakfast. “Her name is Ah Choo—you know, like a little sneeze.” She placed Ah Choo on the pillow beside her as a nurse bustled about the room.

  She told them the hardest thing about leaving was saying goodbye to the children at Tala. She had bonded closely with many of them, coming to think of them as her own.

  “That’s what I hated most,” she said. “When I said good-bye, they cried as though they were attending my funeral.”

  When the reporters left, she inspected her surroundings. There was a ceiling fan and wall fan, a washbasin with hot and cold taps, a rocking chair, a dresser with a mirror, window blinds to shut out the sun. Three hundred letters addressed to her were stacked neatly on a table. One young man brought in a huge confectioner’s box. Inside was a pink-and-white frosted cake rimmed with thirty tiny candles and bearing the greeting: HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Stanley Stein asked Joey if it was her birthday. “No,” Joey laughed. “But it will be soon. On August 5, and then I’ll be very old, 31 years.”

  Joey was amazed. What comfort and luxury! But a sense of sadness crept in when she remembered Novaliches and her friends back home. If only there was a place like Carville in Manila. She fell asleep with those thoughts. When she woke a few hours later, one of the sisters told her she had several phone calls to return. Joey was escorted down a long covered walkway, past rows of bicycles, to the canteen, where a hushed quiet fell over the crowd when she walked in.

  “This is Joey,” said the man escorting her.

  “Hello, Joey,” one of the patients said.

  “Welcome, Joey,” said another.

  This was followed by a chorus of greetings from the patients. The ice was broken. Suddenly everyone was trying to help her.

  “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” someone asked. “Would you like a cold drink?”

  “Dr. Pepper? 7-Up? Root beer?” someone else said.

  “Ice cream, maybe?” said another.

  In less than a minute, she had two dozen new friends.

  Joey’s escort showed her to the telephone booth, where she returned calls to even more reporters, patiently answering their questions. She was quickly becoming a darling of the news media. A radio show host from WWL New Orleans wanted to broadcast an interview with Joey from Carville. A photographer from the New York Times wanted to take a picture of her. A Time magazine correspondent wanted an interview for a story on the fight to bring her to the United States.

  40

  OLD FEARS

  Not long before Joey arrived at Carville, many Americans wanted nothing to do with victims of leprosy. The hospital at Carville itself was the product of a fearful, uninformed public trying to deal with a “leper problem,” as reporters called it.

  “Leprosy is dreaded most of all diseases, not because it kills, but because it leaves alive; not for its pain—though painful at times, the loss of pain and tactile sensation is dreaded more,” wrote Dr. Ernest Muir, a medical missionary among Bengal leprosy victims. “Mask face, unclosing eyes, slavering mouth, claw-hands and limping feet; or even worse, beetling brows, stuffed nose, ulcerating legs, and painful eyes drawing on towards blindness.”

  Americans thought of leprosy as a disease that happened elsewhere, in another country, another time. It was a nightmarish relic, and the afflicted seemed almost inhuman. So, in cases in which Americans contracted leprosy, the general sentiment was to ostracize the victim.

  The case of John Ruskin Early, an American patriot, serves as a shining example of this national attitude. Early hailed from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, and he served as a private in the Fifth United States Infantry during the Spanish-American War. He saw action in Cuba, where he contracted what he thought was malaria, before being sent with his unit to the Philippines. He quit the army to marry a girl, went to work back home in a pulp mill, and soon fell ill from the chemicals to which he was exposed. In August 1908, no longer well enough to work, Early decided to travel to Washington, DC, to seek his claim for a war pension. But his condition puzzled the medical authorities in the nation’s capital. Soon they claimed to have discovered the leprosy bacteria in a skin sample they’d removed from his red and puffy face. He was immediately quarantined to a tent in a marshy spot on the Potomac River, where he awaited his fate.

  No one knew what to do with Early. To send him back home to North Carolina violated the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1890 and 1893. Early’s wife campaigned for his release, writing to President Taft and eminent leprologists, including the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen, who first discovered Mycobacterium leprae, the intracellular bacterium that causes leprosy. Mrs. Early’s vigorous effort came to the attention of a New York City dermatologist who traveled to Washington to visit Early in 1909. The New York City Health Department didn’t regard leprosy as so contagious as to require segregation, so the dermatologist arranged to treat Early in New York. Early was bundled into a boxcar with a Salvation Army medic who was instructed to destroy all eating and drinking utensils Early touched and to make sure the patient wore rubber gloves at all times. Once in New York, doctors could find no trace of the leprosy bacillus in Early’s skin samples. He was soon cleared to leave on his own.

  Early moved with his family to Virginia and found work on a farm, but when he returned to Washington to collect his pension, he was arrested and quarantined to the same tent he had lived in before. A spate of legal action followed, and he was again sealed in a boxcar and returned to New York. More troubling than his disease was his notoriety. The newspapers were up in arms.

  Early and his family had nowhere to settle openly, so they fled to the West Coast and tried to make a home in Tacoma, Washington, but their secret was soon out, and the locals threw fits about their new neighbors. The US surgeon general quarantined Early to Port Townsend, Washington, where he stayed less than a year before going on the lam. Early had hatched a plan to protest his mistreatment. He secretly traveled back to the East Coast via Canada and, using the alias E. J. Watson, checked into one of Washington’s poshest hotels, the Willard, where several senators and representatives and diplomats were staying. When the city’s chief medical inspector learned where Early was staying, he sprinted over and found Early talking to a gaggle of newspaper reporters.

  “I knew that if I mingled among the well-to-do and the rich and exposed them to contagion,” he told them, “that they would arise out of self-protection and further my plan for a national home.”

  He was right. Congress went into a tizzy. One congressman said Early wandering freely about the country was “worse than turning loose a band of murderers.” Another proposed banishing Early and other victims to an Alaskan island. Early’s plan had worked, and a national leprosarium was suddenly part of the political agenda, but it would be situated far from remote Alaska.

  I
n 1909, when John Early was headed for isolation at Carville, a survey of leprosy in the United States found 139 cases in fourteen states. Fifty of them were in Louisiana, more than double the number from any other state.

  Leprosy was first identified in Louisiana in the 1760s, and it was believed the disease arrived during the slave trade or was brought south by the French-speaking Acadians whom the British ousted from Nova Scotia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Those labeled lepers were mostly exiled to designated colonies or settlements, the largest of which was located in lower Bayou Lafourche, in the swamplands southwest of New Orleans. They lived a miserable existence amid the mosquitoes and alligators of the blackwater swamps. And sometimes they migrated to the cities. In the late 1800s, a considerable number had moved to New Orleans and were mixing freely with the uninfected population. This was a source of robust consternation for those not afflicted.

  Like everywhere else, the New Orleans medical community held conflicting views of leprosy. It was infectious and contagious. It was hereditary and incurable.

  In the 1890s, a New Orleans dermatologist named Isadore Dyer began trying to bring leprosy into the framework of science and medicine.

  “Leprosy has always stood as the example of the most fearful of human afflictions,” he wrote. “The Biblical estimate of the disease has created a popular horror which even down to modern times has placed the leper as a pariah and a person condemned by his state to abandonment. It must be classed among the contagious diseases, not as contagious as tuberculosis or syphilis, but still a menace of no mean importance, when it is considered that its spread is as constant as it is insidious and that its evidences are more horrible than most known diseases.”

  Dyer favored segregation as much for the protection of the healthy from the leprosy victims as to protect the “lepers” from the healthy. He was critical of the keeper of a “pest house” for leprosy patients in New Orleans. A muckraking young journalist from the Daily Picayune wrote a series of articles in the 1890s exposing the horrible conditions at the place, much like A. H. Lacson would later do with Tala. The series and Dyer’s preaching finally convinced the state legislature of the need to form a State Board of Control for the Leper Home in order to find a permanent site for a new colony where patients could live.

  The idea was to isolate those afflicted and also provide treatment and nursing by those willing. But no sooner was a site selected, no matter how remote, than protest raged against it. The commission thought it had secured a fine site on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, twenty miles from the nearest house. But as soon as it was announced, those who lived around the lake raised holy hell. They complained that waste runoff and hospital debris would wash up on their shores and spread the disease. The “leper commission” buckled under the pressure and started its search anew.

  The commission soon set its sights on an abandoned slavery-era sugar plantation on the Mississippi River called Indian Camp, in Iberville Parish, not far from a prosperous town called White Castle. The ruse to the locals was that the 337-acre plantation was being converted into an ostrich farm, and the commission quietly transformed the dilapidated antebellum mansion into a hospital and the slave quarters into dormitories for the new patients. The plantation had room for one hundred lepers.

  After dark on November 31, 1894, seven of the ten inmates at the pest house were loaded onto carts and driven to the New Orleans wharf in secrecy, where Dyer and a few journalists were waiting. The group climbed aboard a coal barge, and a tug started churning north on the black Mississippi toward Indian Camp.

  They couldn’t keep the plan quiet for even twenty-four hours. As soon as the sun came up, the ten-year-old son of the local postmaster rode his pony to the top of the levee to catch sight of the ostriches that were supposed to be coming.

  “Lordy, Lordy, little boss,” said his companion, an elderly black man. “Them’s no ostriches—them’s sick folks!”

  When locals finally figured out what was going on, they protested vigorously, signing a petition and threatening violence. But it was too late. The Louisiana Leper Home opened in 1894, the first leprosarium in the United States.

  But difficulties remained. First, the locals didn’t want them there. They refused to sell bread and supplies to the hospital, so goods had to be shipped upriver from New Orleans. The servants and nurses at the hospital were warned they’d be shot if they set foot off the grounds. Besides that, the patients didn’t like the idea of being confined or in some cases forced to leave behind their husbands or wives or children. Some simply refused to go. State officials decided that the inert and stubborn victims would be rounded up, but no law enforcement officers were happy about orders to hunt down lepers, physically round them up, and transport them to Carville. The last time the Board of Health had sent a commission down Bayou Lafourche to examine the lepers in the largest colony in the state, the afflicted were scared they were going to be captured and imprisoned, so they fled deep into the swamps to hide.

  Little by little during the following decades, improvements were made at the hospital, and patients began to migrate voluntarily. And they began to make Carville home. They grew vegetable gardens and decorated their rooms and argued for modern conveniences like hot plates and bicycles. Some of them married and built their own homes on the hospital grounds from scrap materials and salvaged wood. The patients organized and convinced hospital authorities to improve the facilities. They got a soda fountain, a swimming pool, a telephone booth, and a modern lounge.

  Most of the amenities were a direct result of the work of patient no. 746, Stanley Stein.

  41

  CRUSADER

  Stanley Stein arrived at Carville in 1931, seventeen years before Joey, carrying copies of the New Yorker and Theater Arts and dressed in a Brooks Brothers topcoat, a natty tweed suit, a perfectly knotted foulard, and spats. Rumor spread among the patients that he was a millionaire from New York.

  The truth was, Stein was a Texan, born and raised outside San Antonio, with a degree in pharmacology from the University of Texas. He had opened a drugstore in San Antonio after college, but his real love was the community’s little Jewish theater. He wanted to be an actor and was chasing that dream when the first symptoms of leprosy started appearing on his skin.

  In a century of rapid scientific advancement, the disease still carried a stigma, reinforced by confused biblical injunctions and historical medical ignorance. A doctor sent Stein to New York for treatment, but that doctor reported him as a leper, and almost overnight he was swept up and sent secretly by train to New Orleans, then to Carville. American quarantine laws required that leprosy victims be locked away without means to legally protest.

  Stein’s arrival was a culture shock. He noticed rows of barbed wire atop the tall cyclone fence surrounding the hospital, at the time called US Marine Hospital No. 66. He realized he was no longer free. He was in exile in his own country.

  “Have you decided on your new name, young man?” one of the sisters asked him. Sidney Levyson was his birth name, but on arrival at Carville, he was encouraged to change it.

  “Suddenly it all made sense,” Stein would later write. “I was not just a sick man entering a hospital. I was a lost soul consigned to limbo, an outcast, and I must spare my family from any share in my disgrace. My mother, who adored me, had hidden my secret from her closest relatives. Uncle Berthold had almost fainted when he learned the truth. I myself had not wanted my friends and relatives to know what was wrong with me.”

  Stein was young, thirty-one, and educated, but this was new.

  “You have done nothing to be ashamed of,” the sister told him, “but there are some stupid people in the world and you must protect your loved ones from their stupidity. Perfectly healthy children have been denied the right to attend school because some member of their family was at Carville. Some patients have preferred that their friends believe them to be dead to save their families from abuse and ostracism. Choose a name you will be proud of
someday.”

  Stanley Stein was born. With the change, his life suddenly seemed uncomplicated. He was soon studying leprosy, and the head nurse at Carville was happy to turn over her copies of the International Journal of Leprosy and Modern Methods with an Ancient Scourge for his research. Stein was surprised to learn his malady and the malady of the others at Carville had nothing whatsoever in common with the symptoms of the biblical “leprosy” in Leviticus 13: “When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, a scab, or bright spot, and it be in the skin of his flesh like the plague of leprosy; then he shall be brought unto Aaron the priest, or unto one of his sons the priests. And the priest shall look on the plague in the skin of the flesh: and when the hair in the plague is turned white, and the plague in sight be deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a plague of leprosy: and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him unclean.”

  Stein noticed off the bat that there was a sort of hopeless apathy hovering over the place. The listlessness with which his fellow inmates went about their daily lives sickened him. He couldn’t understand why the laughter at Carville—what laughter there was—was of despair. He understood that they were all suffering from a disease that made half the world panic and flee, but it was less terrible than cancer and less contagious than syphilis.

  He aimed to make the most of his new life as an outcast. He took a job, got a role in a patient play, and met new friends. Soon he convinced a few of them to help him start a patient newspaper, the Star, and gave it the motto: “Radiating the light of truth on Hansen’s disease.” The first issue was printed on May 16, 1931, two and a half months after Stein arrived, and it carried a sports column, social calendar, drama criticism, and a feature story about a hen caring for four baby kittens on the Carville campus. But a few short years later, the Star had become a trumpet for the rights of Carville patients and Hansen’s victims all over. People took to calling Stanley Stein the Carville Crusader.