I really want to get as a gift for my mom this book she’s mentioned really loving when she was a teenager. It was supposedly a novel about two lepers at the Hansonville leper colony who fall in love. Problem is, I think she’s wrong about the Hansonville part. I’ve googled and there doesn’t seem to be any Hansonville leper colony, fictional or non. The book must have been written before, say, 1975. I’d really like to get ahold of it.
Does anyone have a lead?
The real name for leprosy is Hansen’s disease.
The real colony in Louisiana was called Carrville.
Maybe she mixed some details up.
From a WorldCat search using “leprosy and fiction” as searches and looking at things written before 1975 that don’t mention Father Damien or Molokai or such in the title, here’s a few:
I can’t find a description of this one, but it is set in the U.S.
There’s also the Graham Greene novel A BURNT-OUT CASE, but it’s set in Africa. There’s also James Michener’s novel HAWAII, but the leper colony portion is only a very small percentage.
Do you happen to know if the main characters include a medical missionary or anything like that? I might be able to search for it that way.
I’m not sure; I think both of the characters are lepers, though I might be wrong. I can find out. Thanks for finding those books-- so far Village of Outcasts seems to be the most likely answer.
Hi –
Don’t know if you’re still looking, but the name of the book was Miracle at Carville by Betty Martin, about a teenager who is hospitalized for Hansen’s Disease in 1929, is rejected by her family, and eventually falls in love with another patient.