Hope at Carville

The new doctor reporting for duty at the federal hospital on the lower Mississippi was in a hurry, and he strode along the path by the levee paying no attention to the hazards. He brushed against a shower-soaked crepe myrtle, and, in an instant, his trig new Public Health Service uniform was drenched. Barely pausing, Dr. Frederick Andrew Johansen loosed a stream of expletives that he had learned as a boy among the mule skinners in Missouri. A couple of patients told the others what they had heard. From that first moment, the patients concluded that Dr. Johansen ("Dr. Jo") was as human as they come.

In those days (1924), humanity was about all that the inmates of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at Carville, La. could hope for. It had been denied them and their kind throughout history. For they were victims of leprosy.

Dr. Jo had decided to take the job at Carville for one year because of his interest in dermatology. But he stayed year after year as staff doctor, then as executive officer and finally as director. At first. he could give the patients only humanity and the traditional palliative, chaulmoogra oil. ("We used to take the oil three ways," a patient recalls. "Externally, internally and eternally.")

Gradually, often by cussing out standpatters who were in his way, Dr. Jo got the word around Carville that leprosy was one of the least contagious of diseases (tuberculosis is a hundred times more catching), and that there was no need for its victims to be shunned so long as they were under a doctor's care.

Lately, under Dr. Jo's directorship, visitors have been welcomed at Carville (only children under twelve are barred), and the hospital has a team in a Baton Rouge softball league. Most important for the patients, they now know that most of them will go home.

No bookworm (he often has to look up the spelling of medical trade terms) and not much of a laboratory researcher. Dr. Johansen never gave up hope that somebody, somewhere, would find a drug to cure leprosy. He worked conscientiously with the sulfas. Then, at the end of World War II, came the sulfones, such as Diasone, Promacetin and sulphetrorie.

"They are not specifics," says Dr. Jo, "but they cure secondary infections and halt the spread of the disease. Nowadays, if the disease is caught in its early stages, the patient can be treated here for two or three years, and then has a good chance of being discharged without any disfiguring signs. After that, he can be treated by his own doctor." For the future, Dr. Jo has still more hope: "Within our lifetime we shall have a cure."

Now, 29 years after he was doused by the crepe myrtle, Dr. Jo has turned 64. He has done all he can for Carville's 400 victims of leprosy (or Hansen's disease, as he and they prefer to call it). This week he was retired by law. But around the world there are 7,000,000 victims who might benefit from his humanity and the sulfones he has learned to use so well.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.