Some 60 miles north of New Orleans, a mud road strays off from the main highway, cuts through rich, sombre swampland I down to the green levees girdling the Mississippi. There, hidden in an elbow of the I river, far from the nearest village, stands a white-columned plantation house. Guarding the house are two gigantic oaks, shrouded in ghostly Spanish moss. The cottages behind the oaks might belong to sugarcane workers or tenant farmers. But the 367 men & women who live at Carville cut no cane, plough no field. They are lepers.
In the Middle Ages lepers were dreaded and shunned,...
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