July 15, 2025 • 56 mins
We’ve got a very special episode of the TPWKY book club this week! We’re featuring our very first fiction book: King of the Armadillos by Wendy Chin-Tanner. This novel tells the story of a young man named Victor, who is sent from his home in New York City to a federal treatment facility in Carville, Louisiana after a diagnosis of Hansen’s disease (then known as leprosy). After being ripped away from his family and the life he knew, Victor struggles to navigate his new situation, facing racism, stigma, and loneliness. Ultimately, he finds support in the lively community of Carville. Wendy joins us to discuss her creative process for this beautifully-written book, and how her father’s life provided the basis for Victor’s story. Tune in for a heartfelt conversation about a long-forgotten piece of public health history and the powerful meaning that diseases can hold.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast will
Kill You. You're listening to the latest episode in our
tp w k Y book Club series, where I sit
down with authors of popular science and medicine books to
chat about their latest work. I've gotten to have some
incredible conversations so far, and we have even more excellent
(01:05):
books lined up for the rest of this season. If
you'd like to see the full lineup of books we've
covered so far this season and in past seasons, as
well as get a sneak peek of the books that
we'll be featuring in upcoming episodes, head over to our
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(01:25):
dot Org affiliate account. Clicking that link will take you
to a page where you can find all sorts of
TPWKY related book lists, including one that has all of
the book club books. I'll be updating this list throughout
the season, so check in regularly to see what new
ones I've added. And I say it every time, but
(01:47):
I mean it every time. We love hearing from you all,
so if you have any thoughts on these books, any
suggestions for future ones to cover or topic suggestions for
our regular episodes, please reach out. The best way to
get in touch with us is through the contact us
form on our website and a couple more pieces of
(02:08):
business before we can get into the Book of the Week,
and that is to please rate, review, and subscribe. It
really does help us. And finally, you can now find
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Make sure you're subscribed to the exactly right media YouTube
channel so you never miss an episode drop. So far
(02:28):
in this series, we've covered a huge variety of topics
plant and animal derived poisons, the global history of tuberculosis,
how memory works, disease themed movies, and so many more.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
But all of.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
These topics, or at least all of the books that
have reported on them, have been nonfiction. Until today. This
special episode of the TPWKY Book Club features our very
first novel, of the Armadillos, critically acclaimed winner of the
twenty twenty five Louisiana Literary Award. In King of the Armadillos,
(03:08):
author Wendy Chin Tanner draws on her father's experience to
tell the story of a young man diagnosed with Hanson's
disease then known as leprosy, who is sent to a
federal treatment facility in Carvia, Louisiana. Ripped away from his
family and life in New York City, Victor finds himself
adrift in Carville until he finds an outlet in music
(03:31):
and a supportive community in the other residents at the Leprosarium.
Through her lyrical prose and exquisite attention to historical detail,
Chin Tanner transports readers to the lively grounds of Carville
in the mid twentieth century with its rich tapestry of characters.
At Carville, readers experience the world through Victor's eyes, a
(03:55):
world that is not always kind and welcoming. Victor struggle
with othering not only due to his diagnosis, but also
his status as a Chinese immigrant, which complicates his relationship
with his family as well as his own self worth.
By following Victor during his time at Carville, readers get
an insight not only into a disease heavy with meaning
(04:18):
throughout its history, but also a young boy's coming of
age journey with all its heartbreak, wonder lessons, and love.
King of the Armadillos is a beautifully written, heartfelt journey
through a long forgotten but vitally important part of public
health history, and it serves as a powerful reminder of
(04:39):
the significant stigma that diseases can carry. I am super
excited to share this interview with you all, so let's
just take a quick break and get started. Wendy, thank
(05:12):
you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Oh, thank you so much for having the era and
it's such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I want to start just by getting a little bit
about the inspiration of your book. So, your book, King
of the Armadillos, it takes us through the incredible story
of a young man named Victor who is diagnosed with
Hanson's disease historically known as leprosy, at the age of fifteen,
and which leads to him then leaving New York for
a treatment facility in Louisiana. And I understand that this
(05:39):
is a deeply personal story for you. Can you tell
me a bit about the inspiration for your book?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Absolutely, King of the Armadillos is a fictionalized coming of
age story that was inspired by my own family. So,
when my father was sixteen years old in nineteen fifty four,
he was living in the bra with my grandfather at
the back of the laundry he owned in the Bronx,
And like Victor, he had come over as a young child,
(06:08):
leaving my grandmother behind in China, and as a teenager
he was diagnosed with Hanson's disease otherwise known as leprosy
and sent to the Federal Institution for the Treatment of
Leoparsy in Carville, Louisiana, where he stayed for nine years
until nineteen sixty three. So that was significantly longer than
our character Victor.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Nine years, I mean, that is an incredibly long time.
And how much did you know about your father's story
before writing this book. Was this something that was sort
of discussed regularly? How familiar was it to you?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Extremely familiar. So it's interesting even though I knew from
a very young age that we shouldn't talk about it
outside of our home. I'm an only child, a very
sort of enmeshed immigrant only child, or only child of
an immigrant family, and as a result, you know, I'm
very very close to my dad. I was a chatty,
(07:04):
inquisitive child and my dad is a chatty guy. So
you know, within our home and between us, it was
very openly discussed. Because those nine years were so formative
to my dad, and his best stories were about Carville.
So to me growing up, it was this magical place
(07:27):
like Narnia or Oz. It was part of our family mythology.
And the fact is, you know, my father made it
sound this way, and it actually, in reality is incredibly
beautiful and haunting. And you know, it's on the banks
of the Mississippi River in a disused sugar plantation, and
(07:50):
you know, it's got live oaks dripping with Spanish moss,
four hundred acres of rolling green fields, and in reality
it looks more like a small liberal arts college than
it does an institution.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It's also this very important institution in the history of
public health here in the US. And yet absolutely most
people have no idea that it once existed, that what
it where you know today that you can go and
there's a museum. And what do you think accounts for that? Forgetfulness?
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Well, I think that leprosy is and was the most
stigmatized and misunderstood illness on Earth. I think I can
I can validly say that so much so that lepper
is a metaphor for stigma. So I think that that
accounts for it to a degree. I think also people
(08:47):
who had been patients there had so much of a
taboo around speaking about it after they were discharged. Even today,
I don't think that they want to recognize what is
in fact a really significant place, significant time, and significant
role that they played in American history, and not only
(09:09):
in public health history, but in the history of collective
and grassroots organization, because there was this powerful patients federation
that advocated for their own quality of life in a
really interesting way that was in many ways a precursor
to the HIV AIDS movement.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Actually, let's take a quick break, and when we get back,
there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
(09:50):
been chatting with Wendy Chintanner about her book King of
the Armadillas. Let's get back into things patient advocacy groups
and standing up and just raising awareness. Yeah, I think
is such an important aspect of.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
That movement, utilizing pr Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
And I heard that you initially were toying with the
idea of nonfiction versus fiction. When did you make that
decision and what sort of led you to land on
fiction as the way to tell this story.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Well, I resisted landing on fiction for a very long time. Yes,
because before writing this book, I had never written fiction
before in any form. I had never even written a
short story. I was a poet. I had published a
couple of poetry collections before starting to write this book,
and before that, my academic training, my graduate training was
(10:43):
in sociology, so I knew how to write a social
science paper, and I knew how to write a poem,
but I had no idea how to write fiction, much
less a novel. So when my dad told me that
I kind of had carte blanche to write about his experience,
(11:03):
and that wasn't something that happened until about twenty twelve,
twenty thirteen, that he had this sort of revelation, I
suppose after having about with cancer, which thankfully he's completely
clean and cured, his second sort of miraculous recovery in
his life. He had this realization, a revelation that his
(11:28):
experience was significant and it was something that people should
know about and that you know, we're only as sick
as our secrets, and that it should be celebrated and acknowledged.
So he told me that I could write about it,
and he also helped me get sort of a backstage pass.
He helped me get hundreds and hundreds of pages of
(11:51):
archival material from the museum, from the curator who Elizabeth Schcksnyder,
who has since become a close fan friend. And it
was really an overwhelming over abundance of material. Yeah, and
not only was it just you know, all of his
medical records and all of this history. I couldn't find
(12:15):
my way into telling the story the way I wanted
to tell it. There got to a point where the
idea of writing a book that was absolutely true to
my dad's experience of nine years there became less important
than the story that I could tell with the creative
(12:37):
freedom that I could tell it with via fiction. I mean,
as someone who writes in multiple genres, I feel like
the writing process is pretty mysterious to me. And there's
a point at which a project will announce itself as
whatever it needs to be. And that happened for this
(12:58):
book probably after I wrote the first chapter. So I
wrote the first chapter. The first chapter that I wrote
is actually the first chapter in the book. Amazingly, it
was the train Journey, because you know, I wanted to
top and tail it with train journeys like the Magic Mountain,
which I wanted to kind of tip my hat my
hat to. But after writing that first chapter, what really
(13:21):
started to grasp my imagination were scenes and characters and
side stories that I couldn't possibly substantiate with data and
with the information that I had at hand. And I
wanted to tell this kind of broader story of the
family system, of Victor's family system, and not just his
(13:45):
experience at Carville per se that. And also, you know,
I was writing this book largely during the pandemic, and
I had my parents staying with me. I live in
Upstate New York. My parents live in Greenwich Village in
New York City, which you probably recall was like ground
zero of COVID, and so I brought them up to
(14:08):
upstate New York to our house and they lived there
during the pandemic. And you know, my dad was reading
over my shoulder as it were a lot of what
I was producing. And while it was really useful to
have him there as you know, a fact checker, there
came a point where it made me self conscious. I
(14:31):
think we all idealize our parents, right, and it's very
difficult when you idealize someone to write them as fully
human as they need to be. So you know, I
needed a way to kind of mess Victor up, you know,
make him as you know, difficult and contradictory, as I
(14:54):
know myself to be. But you know, with my dad
there in my home, and not just with him in
my home, but knowing that I was writing his past,
I couldn't do that. I couldn't make him as fully
human as I needed to in order to serve the story.
So that's when I kind of realized that I had
to take the plunge into fiction. That and also when
(15:17):
I started to write the music piece because I'm not
a musician.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
That's so funny because music plays such a huge role.
It's I feel like he you know, Victor uses it
as an escape at the beginning, and then also a
tether later on to keep him grounded to the world
when things are really overwhelming. And I just assumed that
you were musical, but you say that you're not. So
what does music represent to you in this story?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Well, a musical in the sense that I have a
deep appreciation for music and have always loved it. And
my dad is a musician, like Victor, and he did also,
like Victor, discover that he had a gift for music.
When he was in Carville. So there has been music
in my home from day one. And I did have
(16:07):
piano lessons as a child, although I didn't progress really,
you know, into being a fully fledged musician. I can
carry a tune, and my dad actually taught me to
play the piano like he was my first teacher, which
was really amazing. With by the way, some of the
books that he brought back from Carville, some of his
(16:27):
music books, so we still have that. And my dad
actually a few weeks ago showed me something that I'm
somewhat embarrassed about because I graffited one of these books
as like a six year old in my series of
scrawling six year old handwriting. It's like, oh my god,
this is our clime on my cerials.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
This is horrible.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
I'm defaced, But it was. It was just very alive
in my house. And so music for Victor is his
his his self discovery as an artist and his growth
as an artist, and is part and parcel of his healing,
not just in terms of his illness but in terms
(17:11):
of his trauma. So getting Hanson's disease wasn't his first trauma.
You know. Victor lived through war, lived through famine, lived
through family separation and immigration and racism and poverty, so
you know, he had already learned to roll with life's
(17:31):
punches by the time he got to Carville. So there's
a certain kind of numbing or self numbing that often occurs,
I think, particularly in those of us who are socialized
male and those of us who are of that generation,
which was technically the silent generation. Actually, my dad was
(17:51):
born in nineteen thirty seven, so you know, there was
no emotional labor whatsoever anywhere. So you know, my dad,
like many of the other patients at Carville, learned to
heavily compartmentalize. And I wanted to portray that in Victor's character,
that he as he explores himself as a musician, that's
(18:14):
a way for him to reintegrate the parts that had
been separated in order to survive. You know, as we
all know, coping mechanisms become maladaptive over time. So Victor
is discovering that his coping mechanisms up until that point
had stopped working, and then he found a way into
(18:36):
his art in order to heal and grow from that.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I love seeing the growth through that musicality, through discovering
more about himself. And also I'm curious whether the process
of writing this book. You know, you say that you
were familiar with your dad's story since for as long
as you can remember. Did the process of writing this
book kind of give you any more insight or understand
(19:00):
into his experiences or was there more that you learned
that you were surprised to learn while putting this book together?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Oh so much of both. I think in order to
perform that hat trick around music, that was my way
into the character and to very fully empathizing with him,
Because in order to portray what it is to discover
oneself as a musician and to start to play and
(19:27):
start to compose, I had to find a way to
bridge my own experience discovering myself as a young poet
and discovering poetry and writing it. I had to transpose
that into Victor's discovery of music and writing music. So
within that process, I think there was a kind of
(19:48):
deep identification that happened, a kind of transference, if you will,
And there was a kind of intense empathy that was
created between me and my understanding of my father at
that age. That and also my dad and I took
a trip to Carville in twenty sixteen to do research together,
(20:10):
and that was his first time back in fifty three years,
which was really remarkable. After he was discharged, he went
back to New York, which many of his peers did
not do because, unlike my dad, most of his peers
did not have a home to go back to. They
were so fully estranged from their families that they chose
to stay in the only home that they had that
(20:32):
and also there was a possibility of federal funding for educations.
Some of his peers went to LSU, for example, which
Victor is grappling with towards the end of the book.
But my dad went to New York, and in his
exit interview, as in most exit interviews at that time
in the nineteen sixties, he was told to not look
(20:55):
behind and to look ahead, and to forget about his experience,
and to not tell any one that he had been
in Carville, to not tell anyone that he had had
hands ends, because if he wanted to reintegrate into society,
if he wanted to get a job, get married, move
forward in life like a quote unquote regular person, he
(21:16):
would have to leave that behind and recompartmentalize as it were.
So this was, you know, a sort of official advice,
which is somewhat contradictory, self contradictory because at the same time,
there were services outside of cardal to help patients reintegrate.
You know, for example, my dad's first job when he
(21:37):
got back to New York was through the American leoprosy Mission,
I believe, So there were still ties. It wasn't a
complete severing, but there was this code of silence that
was institutionalized.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Having that be sort of the official guidance precisely, it's
a surprising but also not surprising. But just said, I
think in a way that like this is something because
what it does is just further the shame and stigma
surrounding Hanson's.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
And I think that also circles back to partially answering
one of your previous questions about why this place and
this incredible achievement of federally funded medicine is so unsung. Right, Yeah,
I think it contributes to that. And you know, for
what it's worth, it was realistic, right it was. I
(22:28):
don't think that five hundred patients, only a handful of
whom we're going to leave the institution, were they to
reintegrate into their original home environments. I don't think it's
realistic to assume that they could just be loud and
proud that they just didn't have the numbers to do so,
(22:48):
and to face the intensity of the taboo and stigma
around leprosy that still exists today. It actually still exists
today and stops people from coming forward to seek treating. Meant,
I think it's somewhat realistic. Sad, but realistic.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Let's take a quick break here, We'll be back before
you know it. Welcome back, everyone. I'm here chatting with
(23:24):
the wonderful Wendy chin Tanner about her book King of
the Armadillas. Let's get into some more questions. And that
kind of gets me to another question that I had
about sort of the state of Hanson's disease in the
nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, and just sort of a if
we could go through a general overview. First, you know
what causes Hanson's disease, what are that some of the symptoms,
(23:46):
and then what treatments were available to someone at that time.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yes, so Hanson sees is the bacterial infection that left
untreated will attack the nervous system, Initially symptoms arise around lesions,
skin lesions, but it can also attack the nerves, which
it did in my dad. So my dad had bilateral
ulnar nerve surgery in his arms and hands, which was
(24:13):
fairly common. But in terms of the nerve disorder part
of it, it will attack the extremities, so hands, feet, fingers, toes,
the areas of the body that are colder. It can
also cause blindness, which it did in Stanley Stein, who
was the inspiration, the real life inspiration for the character
(24:34):
Herb Climb. So it can cause a range of symptoms,
particularly if left untreated for a very long time. Leprosy
is very interesting in that ninety five percent of the
population is naturally immute and it has a very low communicability,
so even the five percent who are susceptible require prolonged
(24:57):
contact close prolonged contact in order to contract it. So
it is not a public health issue at all, actually,
and we've known that even before the cure. But then
in nineteen forty one Carville discovered the cure, the Miracle
of Carville, which is sulfa drugs promen that enabled people
(25:19):
to be fully cured. So from nineteen forty one on,
there was absolutely no need for quarantine. There was no
need for quarantine before that, but from nineteen forty one
on they knew scientifically that there was no need for quarantine,
and yet quarantine persisted until the nineteen sixties. So what
(25:40):
does that tell us? That tells us that this is
politically based and not scientifically based. Nothing makes people panic
quite like leprosy.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
It's true. And I was wondering also about Carville. And
so if someone was diagnosed, let's say, you know, when
your dad was diagnosed with Hanson's disease, what options were
available to someone? Clearly, you know there was this fear
based quarantine aspect of it, but depending on age, on
socioeconomic status, on your race, on where you lived, what
(26:14):
sort of options were available.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
I mean everyone was sent to Carville. Actually with the diagnosis,
everyone was sent to Carville, which is which is amazing
because then in Carville, having Hanson's disease was the great leveler.
So Carville became this incredible microcosm of the United States.
It was racially diverse, and it was also socioeconomically diverse,
(26:41):
and it was diverse in terms of class. So you
had people there who were literally socialized before entering Carville,
and you had people who were a.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Literate That's incredible.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yes, it's absolutely incredible. And that also speaks to Carville
as a social experiment.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Going back to the discussions that we've been having surrounding
shame and stigma at Carville, because everyone that you're around
also has Hanson's disease, understands maybe some of the aspects
of stigma and shame, which then might alleviate some of that.
But at the same time, you're on the grounds that
are surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Yes, how did
(27:19):
that sort of dynamic influence daily life at Carville and
the interaction with the surrounding town.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
I think there was very little interaction with the surrounding
town except in these sort of furtive forays out. So
there was there was a bar that was down the
river road, a kind of dive bar called the Red
Rooster that patients would sneak out of a hole in
the fence to get to. And they would also sneak
(27:48):
out of the hole in the fence to go fishing
on the Mississippi River or to go have picnics on
the banks of the Mississippi River, and also to abscond,
so some people did had run off for various reasons,
either to get married and then come back in or
to just you know, book it, either home or elsewhere,
(28:10):
and if they were caught and returned, then they would
have to stay in the Carville jail for thirty days,
the Cargal jail. Yes, but so within the confines of
the institution you had during its heyday, which were the
nineteen fifties, the period that I'm writing about, about five
hundred patients, and it functioned like a small town in
(28:32):
and of itself, so it was completely self contained. It
had its own working dairy, it had its own post office,
it had two churches, It had a school where my
dad finished high school. And it had all of the
amenities of a small liberal arts college or of a
country club, you know. It had a golf course, it
(28:54):
had a lake, it had a pool, it had a theater,
it had a movie theater, it had a volleyball court,
it had a softball diamond. I mean everything you can
think of a golf course, you know, all the things.
And it had a press where they published an internationally
circulated magazine. So it was a world unto itself. It
(29:17):
was completely self contained. So for the most part, day
to day life was very normal, you know, and human
beings have this incredible capacity to normalize almost anything. But
in reality, in the nineteen fifties, the quality of life
was very high and it was really just like small
town America.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
It sounds like a very progressive place relative to the
time and the location that the surrounding location.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yes, it was integrated at a time when the South
was segregated, so right outside that fence there was segregation
and Jim Crow and you know, the high school was
a Benetton ad. I'm showing my age by saying that
the high school was.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Very much age by knowing what you mean. That's amazing.
Everyone who was diagnosed with Hanson's disease was sent to
Carville and then had to spend a certain amount of
time there, despite you know, as you mentioned, there being
sulfa drugs that would essentially eliminate the need for any
(30:21):
sort of quarantine. At what point did they leave. What
was that process like for being released from Carville.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Well, until the nineteen sixties, it was. It was a
very arduous process that was once again scientifically speaking, not necessary.
So patients had to have monthly skin smear tests to
see how much of the Hansen's basilie they still had
in their system, and they required twelve consecutive negative tests
(30:53):
in order to be considered for discharge.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
And negative meanings no bacteria whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Correct, So you could, in essence, get eleven negatives and
then suddenly test positive and then you were right back
to square one. But you know, even after the twelfth
negative test, you had to go before the board and
you had to you know, have the go ahead of
(31:20):
the physicians and the medical officer in charge in order
to then be officially discharged.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
That does sound like a hugely frustrating process, and as
you beautifully describe in your book, this anxious awaiting of
each month, what's going to happen, what's it going to show?
What does that mean for my future? This unknowing about
what will happen, and just sort of being beholden to that.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
So in some ways it made sense that some people
just kind of gave up and decided I'm just going
to stay here forever, because this is kind of the
good life anyway. Yeah, and there's also this actually a
psychological phenomenon around institutional lifezation of becoming so accustomed to
(32:04):
incarceration essentially that you become indoctrinated or interpolated into that system,
and you are fearful of returning to society even if
you can. You know, Carville was a federally funded institution
that amazingly had both the funds and the wish to
(32:28):
allow patients to choose whether they would be discharged or stay,
even after they were technically able to be discharged. So
a lot of people did choose to stay, including Stanley Stein.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Which I would love to talk more about Stanley Stein,
because Yeah, Herb is one of my favorite characters in
your book. I loved him, and I was very curious
to know more about the real life person that this
character is based on. So what can you tell me
about Stanley?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yes, so, Herb client is based on a real lie,
disabled gay Jewish American hero whose name was Stanley Stein.
And you know, he was a closeted gay man at
the time, but it was you know, it was an
unspoken truth. And interestingly too, even though he was living
(33:20):
with a man and it was generally known that, you know,
he was a gay man. He was the head of
the patient's Federation, He was the founding editor and editor
in chief of the Star magazine, and you know, he
was the de facto mayor of Carville. Basically, he was
(33:40):
a pharmacist from a small town in Texas and in
the nineteen thirties he was diagnosed with Hanson's disease and
he was sent to Carville, and this was ten years
before the cure. So he lived with the disease for
so long that he became permanently disabled. So by the
(34:03):
time my dad got there in the nineteen fifties and
met him in the infirmary, Stanley was unable to walk
without a caine. Eventually he would be unable to walk
at all. And he was blind and he couldn't even
read Braille because his fingertips had become so desensitized from
the disease that he had to have everything read out
(34:27):
loud to him. So my dad and Victor in the
book volunteered to be one of his readers. So he
would read everything from his correspondence to newspapers to proofs
of the articles, which he would then edit, you know,
and yeah, it was really extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
That is that is amazing. And I also just love
that your dad liked Victor in your book actually had
this like close relationship.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yes, and in real life too, Stanley became somehow he
was incredibly charismatic and charming, just this uncon commonly charismatic
and charming man, and he became pen pals, initially with
Hollywood star Telula Bankhead, and then they became besties in
(35:13):
real life. I have archival photos of Stanley and Tallula.
There was a point at which Stanley went on leave
and he and Tallula were in New York going to parties,
going to Broadway shows. There are pictures of Tallula sitting
on his lap. I mean, it's really incredible. And so
Tallula became his sort of Hollywood spokesperson for the Star magazine,
(35:38):
and she strong armed all of her friends to subscribe,
and it grew from being a sort of, as Stanley
called it, a gossip brag within Carville itself, to having
ninety thousand subscribers all around the world.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
First of all, I really want to see those pictures.
They sound amazing. And secondly, I love that spread of
the Star magazine. How how huge that got? So what
was in this magazine? What sort of articles were there?
What information was presented?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
So it was founded just a couple of years after
Stanley got to Carville. And what was really interesting about
that was kind of stumbling into you know, what I
like to think of as euros. Euros in the sense
of life force, not just libido. Right. So, and Eros
stands in the contradiction to Tanatos, which is the death drive. Right.
(36:33):
So Carville was all about eros. It was all about imagination,
creative endeavor. You know. Not only was Stanley really interested
in musical theater and you know, he was involved in
place and stuff like that, but he found it within
a couple of years of getting to Carvil, the Star magazine.
He had been interested in journalism before getting to Carville.
(36:57):
He had dabbled in it, but his father was pharmacists,
so he became a pharmacist, and so he was a
bit of a frustrated creative who then was able to
blossom as a fully fledged creative when he got to Carville,
which was really interesting. So it started really small, just
a locally circulated, you know, within Carville sort of magazine,
(37:19):
and over time it had a bigger mission. And the
mission was to shine a light on the truth of
Hanson's disease and restore dignity.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
To its sufferers.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
So I think Stanley basically took the Star as an
opportunity to show the outside world what was happening within Carville,
show the outside world what patient life really was like,
to reduce the stigma around Hansen's to talk about the
(37:51):
newest discoveries and things like that. But he also, I
think used it very brilliantly to put the screw to
the administration when he and the Patients Federation were advocating
for higher quality of life, because you know, while it
(38:12):
was mostly a progressive place, it wasn't always so, and
the quality of life for patients was almost entirely dictated
by the medical officer in charge. So it was either
a benevolent dictatorship or it was not. So there were
some times in which, you know, you had this kind
(38:35):
of golden Age or you know Carvilion Renaissance of culture.
If you had a medical officer in charge who like
doctor Johansson after which the lake is named because he
built it for the patients, there was a kind of
blossoming of normalcy and culture and arts. And he was,
(38:56):
you know, very slack about people going out the hole
in the fence, and he allowed for leaves and vacations
and things like that, because you know, he was science
based and he was also very empathy based. After he retired,
another guy came in, doctor Gordon, who was, you know,
a real stickler for the rules, and he reinstituted all
(39:21):
of these really draconian rules, and he cracked down on
everything from dancing to dating and the married cottages where
you know, married people lived. And Stanley and his quote
unquote friends, Oh my god, yeah, yeah, so he yes,
he was the only bachelor living in the married cottages.
(39:44):
But so doctor Gordon tried to crack down on all
of this, and the Patients Federation organized. They utilized a
lot of the same tactics that the civil rights movement
was using. They had sit ins, they had strod imagine
my dad being a seventeen year old, eighteen year old
very excited about making signs and having sit ins and strikes.
(40:07):
And Stanley also utilized the Star to publicize what was happening,
the conditions that they were dealing with within Carville. And
so there was external pressure and the Patient's Federation was
able to use connections that he cultivated to hire a
(40:31):
lawyer who went to the Hill to speak on their
behalf and also a local politician to go to the
hill and speak on their behalf and within only four
years they managed to kick this guy out.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Oh my god, amazing.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Yeah, the most marginalized of marginalized people.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yes, And to think what one and I know that
it was it was many people involved, but to have
that sort of to have Stanley spearheading this one person
can do and achieve is amazing to think about.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
And also what solidarity and coalitionism can achieve. Because within
the Patient's Federation there were a lot of differing opinions,
a lot of differing political opinions and ideologies and religions
and whatnot. I mean, you could have very much had
factions and schisms and you know what we're seeing now
(41:27):
for example in our country at large. You could have
had that. But they had the opposite. They had solidarity.
They had a cause, a common cause, a common enemy,
I guess, a common cause that they coalesced around and
they made things happen. And so I think that this
experience at such a formative time for my dad really
(41:51):
made him the man that he became. You know, Like
my dad likes to call himself a radical, and he's
you know, after he was discharged, he protested the Vietnam War.
He marched with Doctor Gang. He protested multiple wars with me,
and he was down at Occupy Wall Street, much to
my mother's chagrin because you know, there were a lot
(42:15):
of arrests that were happening, and you know, he was
already somewhat elderly by that point, but he didn't care.
He was down there with his camera. So I think
that is the legacy of Cargo. You know, he became
a very politically engaged citizen.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
And just the power too of the people that you
surround yourself with at a formative time of your life.
And that kind of brings me to this this idea
that I love that comes through in your book so much,
these themes of family and the complexities of family and
found family and Victor in your book, one of his
(42:54):
found family members is her, but he also has these
these other individuals that make the up. And I wanted
to ask you more about that, whether that is you know,
from how you chose that for Victor, or how Victor
told you that's what he needed, and what that reflected about,
you know, life at Carville, the population at Carville, and
(43:14):
also your dad's experience.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah, I mean those questions are somewhat entwined. You know,
my dad left my grandmother behind when he was eight
years old, like Victor, and his father was in reality
even more sort of distant emotionally from him than Sam
in the book. So my dad and Victor were both
(43:39):
very very hungry for connection and very very hungry for mentorship,
and I wanted to portray that in Victor. I wanted
to show him as this, you know, very sensitive kid
who was looking everywhere he could for found family, not
just mentorship, but looking for father figures, looking for mother figures,
(44:02):
and he found them. I think in reality in Carville
there was also that sort of mentorship, particularly of young
patients who were separated from their families, so they were
sort of adopted and taken under the wing of older patients.
So these sorts of informal found families and informal adoptions
(44:23):
would happen in real life. There. Another one of the
found family members that Victor has in the book is
sister Helen, who is based also on a real person,
sister Hilary Ross, who was a very accomplished research scientist
who was also the head of the lab and did
(44:43):
all of the medical photography, and she was instrumental in
helping to find the cure in nineteen forty one. So
I wanted to kind of fold her into this story
as well.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about
Victor's how his life is just sort of punctuated by
trauma after trauma, and you know, with his diagnosis of
Hanson's disease being one of them. And you do such
an incredible job of letting the reader experience this physical
pain through Victor's eyes, through his body, his discomfort, his isolation,
(45:19):
that he feels this loneliness, who like, I don't know
any of these people, what is this place? What do
I do here? And then also just not knowing what's
happening to him his body because the doctors are at
the time very paternalistic and not really feeling. It's important
to let the patient know what is happening. How all
of these feelings are also wrapped up in his experience
(45:43):
as a Chinese immigrant. So I wonder if you could
just talk a little bit about all of these different
the swirls of emotion, this with this aspect of his identity.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yes, I mean, it's also bound up in his experience
as an adolescent, Yes, because he's becoming a man. So
I wanted to think about Carville as a sort of
liminal space, you know, as the in between place that
everyone goes through during rites of passage. So it is
(46:14):
a liminal space between Victor's boyhood and manhood. It's a
liminal space between Victor's illness and wellness. So that's one
aspect of it, and other aspect of the racial aspect
is very interesting. So there was a very large Asian
population at Carville, and when I was researching oral histories
(46:39):
in particular, because you know, that was actually one of
the pieces of research material that was the most rich
for me in terms of helping me understand aspects that
I couldn't find otherwise. For the book, I couldn't find
a single firsthand narrative by an Asian patient, even though
(46:59):
there was such a significantly large population of them. I
don't know if that was because of self selected abstinence,
if that was institutional neglect or something you know, more
nefarious around, you know, just blatant racism. I don't know.
I can't say, but I know that there was a
hole in the record, and so you know, not only
(47:21):
did I feel compelled to fill it, but I felt
compelled to dive even deeper into it. So another thing
that I didn't know until I started researching around the
history of the book, not just around the history of Carville,
was that there is a long relationship in America in
(47:41):
anti Asian hate, between stigmatization of illness, specifically leprosy, and
anti Asian hate. So I discovered, for example, that in
the nineteenth century there was a labor leader named Dennis
Kearney in San Francisco. Dennis Kearney was an Irish immigrant,
(48:04):
which is perhaps ironic that he was also an immigrant,
but you know, he was the ahead of a labor
movement that was pushing for the Exclusion Act to happen
because you know, the Chinese laborers were strike breaking and
they were taking white jobs, et cetera, et cetera, so
you know, part of the racial pecking order of that time,
(48:26):
because Irish immigrants were also not considered fully white. So
you know, that's that's another sort of nuanced intersectional aspect
of this. So at one point Dennis Kearney couldn't get
enough traction with just your usual narratives of taking white
jobs and selling opium and you know, running brothels. So
(48:50):
he found a Chinese man who had lesions on his face,
and he marched him through the streets of San Francisco
and said, if we don't kick out the Chinese, they're
going to give us all leprosy. So disease stigma globally
and throughout history has been a tool, a propaganda tool
(49:13):
for exclusion of particular groups. But so this leprosy story
and the relationship between leprosy and the Chinese population has
persisted from that point on. So, following on the heels
of Dennis Kearney and the Exclusion Act that was passed
in eighteen eighty two, the Joseph Jones, who was the
(49:36):
former head of Louisiana State's Department of Public Health, went
on the record to spread misinformation and he said on
the public record that Chinese laundrymen in New York City.
How he would know that, I don't know, But in
New York City and in New Orleans had a habit
(49:57):
of spitting water on on the clothes that they were ironing,
and thus spreading leprosy to all of their customers. So
you know, as you can probably imagine the media ate
this up. This is very mosationalist clickbait, if you will.
And this story was recycled over and over again. I
(50:19):
found incidents of it in the nineteen forties and even
in the nineteen fifties. So yeah, it was regurgitated again
and again because you know, it's very it's spicy.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
It's yeah, it is. It is amazing how history I
mean maybe doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and it's just
it's something that I feel like we're saying a lot
in the podcast, like misinformation has been around forever and
it is a tool or disinformation, yes, specifically a tool,
and there is an agenda behind it.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
I will say too that as a result of the
Exclusion Act, family separation for Asian families Asian American families
should say, persisted for generations. So in my dad's case,
for example, the first immigrant in my family to come
to the United States was in eighteen forty nine, the
(51:12):
gold Rush. But as a result of exclusion laws, Chinese
men would stay in the States and then go back
to China. Periodically. They would get married, they might have children,
and they would bring their male children to the States.
So you would have generations three, four, five generations of
(51:34):
families that were separated. And what do you think this
does to the psychology of people? What do you think
this does to their capacity to, you know, not only
parent themselves, but to form healthy relationships. It's a psychological
wound that we see within the community that is persistent
(51:56):
for you know, decades and decades and decades rational harm.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Yes, from this. And there are so many different things
that I feel like people can take away from your book,
so many important lessons, so much that we can learn
from Carville. And we could probably spend another hour talking
about all of those. But I wanted to ask you
what your big hope is, if you have one, for
(52:22):
what people take away from this book.
Speaker 2 (52:25):
Wow, that's a big question. I mean, I think it's twofold,
you know. On the one hand, on a more sort
of philosophical level, perhaps I would want people to take
away the idea or the truth that people are people
wherever we are, whether that's in an eighteenth century castle
(52:45):
in France, or it's in a federal institution for the
treatment of lepersy in the nineteen fifties, or if it's
in twenty twenty five in New York City. We all
have the same hopes and desires and dreams, and all
the same capacity to love and to do harm, and
to make mistakes and live with the consequences of them.
(53:08):
This sort of thread of persistent humanity that the patients
at Carville, that the people that I portrayed in the book,
are more than their circumstances. So that's on a philosophical level.
On a more concrete level, I think a takeaway that
I would love for people to have, certainly now, is
(53:31):
that Carville is an example of the government doing it right,
government medicine and federally funded science and medicine achieving something
that really did a lot of good and that not
only found the cure quite quickly, but also took care
(53:51):
of thousands and thousands and thousands of patients in a
way that was empathy based and communitarian and positive. As
you said, we don't have to repeat history, but as
Maya Angelou says, you know, when you know better, do better.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
Beautiful words, very apt, such an important message. I really
just really appreciate you taking the time to chat with
me today. Thank you so much. This was such a
great conversation.
Speaker 2 (54:19):
It's my absolute pleasure, and thank you so much for
having me. I truly appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
A big thank you again to Wendy for taking the
time to chat with me. I so enjoyed this conversation
and book. If you like today's episode and would like
to learn more, check out our website this podcast will
kill You dot com. We're I'll post a link to
where you can find King of the Armadillos as tell
us a link to Wendy's website where you can find
her other incredible work, and don't forget you can check
(55:05):
out our website for all sorts of other cool things,
including but not limited to, transcripts Quarantini and Plasybrita recipes,
show notes and references for all of our episodes, links
to merch our bookshop dot org, affiliate account, our Goodreads list,
a first hand account, form and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking
of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music
(55:26):
for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you
to Leona Scualacci and Tom Bryfogel for our audio mixing,
and thanks to you listeners for listening. I hope you
liked this episode and our loving being part of the
TPWKY book Club. A special thank you, as always to
our fantastic patrons. We appreciate your support so very much. Well,
(55:51):
until next time, keep washing those hands. Bum bum bu
bumbo ou
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast will
Kill You. You're listening to the latest episode in our
tp w k Y book Club series, where I sit
down with authors of popular science and medicine books to
chat about their latest work. I've gotten to have some
incredible conversations so far, and we have even more excellent
(01:05):
books lined up for the rest of this season. If
you'd like to see the full lineup of books we've
covered so far this season and in past seasons, as
well as get a sneak peek of the books that
we'll be featuring in upcoming episodes, head over to our
website This Podcast will Kill You dot com. There, under
the extras tab, you'll find a link to our bookshop
(01:25):
dot Org affiliate account. Clicking that link will take you
to a page where you can find all sorts of
TPWKY related book lists, including one that has all of
the book club books. I'll be updating this list throughout
the season, so check in regularly to see what new
ones I've added. And I say it every time, but
(01:47):
I mean it every time. We love hearing from you all,
so if you have any thoughts on these books, any
suggestions for future ones to cover or topic suggestions for
our regular episodes, please reach out. The best way to
get in touch with us is through the contact us
form on our website and a couple more pieces of
(02:08):
business before we can get into the Book of the Week,
and that is to please rate, review, and subscribe. It
really does help us. And finally, you can now find
full video versions of most of our newer episodes on YouTube.
Make sure you're subscribed to the exactly right media YouTube
channel so you never miss an episode drop. So far
(02:28):
in this series, we've covered a huge variety of topics
plant and animal derived poisons, the global history of tuberculosis,
how memory works, disease themed movies, and so many more.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
But all of.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
These topics, or at least all of the books that
have reported on them, have been nonfiction. Until today. This
special episode of the TPWKY Book Club features our very
first novel, of the Armadillos, critically acclaimed winner of the
twenty twenty five Louisiana Literary Award. In King of the Armadillos,
(03:08):
author Wendy Chin Tanner draws on her father's experience to
tell the story of a young man diagnosed with Hanson's
disease then known as leprosy, who is sent to a
federal treatment facility in Carvia, Louisiana. Ripped away from his
family and life in New York City, Victor finds himself
adrift in Carville until he finds an outlet in music
(03:31):
and a supportive community in the other residents at the Leprosarium.
Through her lyrical prose and exquisite attention to historical detail,
Chin Tanner transports readers to the lively grounds of Carville
in the mid twentieth century with its rich tapestry of characters.
At Carville, readers experience the world through Victor's eyes, a
(03:55):
world that is not always kind and welcoming. Victor struggle
with othering not only due to his diagnosis, but also
his status as a Chinese immigrant, which complicates his relationship
with his family as well as his own self worth.
By following Victor during his time at Carville, readers get
an insight not only into a disease heavy with meaning
(04:18):
throughout its history, but also a young boy's coming of
age journey with all its heartbreak, wonder lessons, and love.
King of the Armadillos is a beautifully written, heartfelt journey
through a long forgotten but vitally important part of public
health history, and it serves as a powerful reminder of
(04:39):
the significant stigma that diseases can carry. I am super
excited to share this interview with you all, so let's
just take a quick break and get started. Wendy, thank
(05:12):
you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Oh, thank you so much for having the era and
it's such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I want to start just by getting a little bit
about the inspiration of your book. So, your book, King
of the Armadillos, it takes us through the incredible story
of a young man named Victor who is diagnosed with
Hanson's disease historically known as leprosy, at the age of fifteen,
and which leads to him then leaving New York for
a treatment facility in Louisiana. And I understand that this
(05:39):
is a deeply personal story for you. Can you tell
me a bit about the inspiration for your book?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Absolutely, King of the Armadillos is a fictionalized coming of
age story that was inspired by my own family. So,
when my father was sixteen years old in nineteen fifty four,
he was living in the bra with my grandfather at
the back of the laundry he owned in the Bronx,
And like Victor, he had come over as a young child,
(06:08):
leaving my grandmother behind in China, and as a teenager
he was diagnosed with Hanson's disease otherwise known as leprosy
and sent to the Federal Institution for the Treatment of
Leoparsy in Carville, Louisiana, where he stayed for nine years
until nineteen sixty three. So that was significantly longer than
our character Victor.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Nine years, I mean, that is an incredibly long time.
And how much did you know about your father's story
before writing this book. Was this something that was sort
of discussed regularly? How familiar was it to you?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Extremely familiar. So it's interesting even though I knew from
a very young age that we shouldn't talk about it
outside of our home. I'm an only child, a very
sort of enmeshed immigrant only child, or only child of
an immigrant family, and as a result, you know, I'm
very very close to my dad. I was a chatty,
(07:04):
inquisitive child and my dad is a chatty guy. So
you know, within our home and between us, it was
very openly discussed. Because those nine years were so formative
to my dad, and his best stories were about Carville.
So to me growing up, it was this magical place
(07:27):
like Narnia or Oz. It was part of our family mythology.
And the fact is, you know, my father made it
sound this way, and it actually, in reality is incredibly
beautiful and haunting. And you know, it's on the banks
of the Mississippi River in a disused sugar plantation, and
(07:50):
you know, it's got live oaks dripping with Spanish moss,
four hundred acres of rolling green fields, and in reality
it looks more like a small liberal arts college than
it does an institution.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It's also this very important institution in the history of
public health here in the US. And yet absolutely most
people have no idea that it once existed, that what
it where you know today that you can go and
there's a museum. And what do you think accounts for that? Forgetfulness?
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Well, I think that leprosy is and was the most
stigmatized and misunderstood illness on Earth. I think I can
I can validly say that so much so that lepper
is a metaphor for stigma. So I think that that
accounts for it to a degree. I think also people
(08:47):
who had been patients there had so much of a
taboo around speaking about it after they were discharged. Even today,
I don't think that they want to recognize what is
in fact a really significant place, significant time, and significant
role that they played in American history, and not only
(09:09):
in public health history, but in the history of collective
and grassroots organization, because there was this powerful patients federation
that advocated for their own quality of life in a
really interesting way that was in many ways a precursor
to the HIV AIDS movement.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Actually, let's take a quick break, and when we get back,
there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
(09:50):
been chatting with Wendy Chintanner about her book King of
the Armadillas. Let's get back into things patient advocacy groups
and standing up and just raising awareness. Yeah, I think
is such an important aspect of.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
That movement, utilizing pr Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
And I heard that you initially were toying with the
idea of nonfiction versus fiction. When did you make that
decision and what sort of led you to land on
fiction as the way to tell this story.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Well, I resisted landing on fiction for a very long time. Yes,
because before writing this book, I had never written fiction
before in any form. I had never even written a
short story. I was a poet. I had published a
couple of poetry collections before starting to write this book,
and before that, my academic training, my graduate training was
(10:43):
in sociology, so I knew how to write a social
science paper, and I knew how to write a poem,
but I had no idea how to write fiction, much
less a novel. So when my dad told me that
I kind of had carte blanche to write about his experience,
(11:03):
and that wasn't something that happened until about twenty twelve,
twenty thirteen, that he had this sort of revelation, I
suppose after having about with cancer, which thankfully he's completely
clean and cured, his second sort of miraculous recovery in
his life. He had this realization, a revelation that his
(11:28):
experience was significant and it was something that people should
know about and that you know, we're only as sick
as our secrets, and that it should be celebrated and acknowledged.
So he told me that I could write about it,
and he also helped me get sort of a backstage pass.
He helped me get hundreds and hundreds of pages of
(11:51):
archival material from the museum, from the curator who Elizabeth Schcksnyder,
who has since become a close fan friend. And it
was really an overwhelming over abundance of material. Yeah, and
not only was it just you know, all of his
medical records and all of this history. I couldn't find
(12:15):
my way into telling the story the way I wanted
to tell it. There got to a point where the
idea of writing a book that was absolutely true to
my dad's experience of nine years there became less important
than the story that I could tell with the creative
(12:37):
freedom that I could tell it with via fiction. I mean,
as someone who writes in multiple genres, I feel like
the writing process is pretty mysterious to me. And there's
a point at which a project will announce itself as
whatever it needs to be. And that happened for this
(12:58):
book probably after I wrote the first chapter. So I
wrote the first chapter. The first chapter that I wrote
is actually the first chapter in the book. Amazingly, it
was the train Journey, because you know, I wanted to
top and tail it with train journeys like the Magic Mountain,
which I wanted to kind of tip my hat my
hat to. But after writing that first chapter, what really
(13:21):
started to grasp my imagination were scenes and characters and
side stories that I couldn't possibly substantiate with data and
with the information that I had at hand. And I
wanted to tell this kind of broader story of the
family system, of Victor's family system, and not just his
(13:45):
experience at Carville per se that. And also, you know,
I was writing this book largely during the pandemic, and
I had my parents staying with me. I live in
Upstate New York. My parents live in Greenwich Village in
New York City, which you probably recall was like ground
zero of COVID, and so I brought them up to
(14:08):
upstate New York to our house and they lived there
during the pandemic. And you know, my dad was reading
over my shoulder as it were a lot of what
I was producing. And while it was really useful to
have him there as you know, a fact checker, there
came a point where it made me self conscious. I
(14:31):
think we all idealize our parents, right, and it's very
difficult when you idealize someone to write them as fully
human as they need to be. So you know, I
needed a way to kind of mess Victor up, you know,
make him as you know, difficult and contradictory, as I
(14:54):
know myself to be. But you know, with my dad
there in my home, and not just with him in
my home, but knowing that I was writing his past,
I couldn't do that. I couldn't make him as fully
human as I needed to in order to serve the story.
So that's when I kind of realized that I had
to take the plunge into fiction. That and also when
(15:17):
I started to write the music piece because I'm not
a musician.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
That's so funny because music plays such a huge role.
It's I feel like he you know, Victor uses it
as an escape at the beginning, and then also a
tether later on to keep him grounded to the world
when things are really overwhelming. And I just assumed that
you were musical, but you say that you're not. So
what does music represent to you in this story?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Well, a musical in the sense that I have a
deep appreciation for music and have always loved it. And
my dad is a musician, like Victor, and he did also,
like Victor, discover that he had a gift for music.
When he was in Carville. So there has been music
in my home from day one. And I did have
(16:07):
piano lessons as a child, although I didn't progress really,
you know, into being a fully fledged musician. I can
carry a tune, and my dad actually taught me to
play the piano like he was my first teacher, which
was really amazing. With by the way, some of the
books that he brought back from Carville, some of his
(16:27):
music books, so we still have that. And my dad
actually a few weeks ago showed me something that I'm
somewhat embarrassed about because I graffited one of these books
as like a six year old in my series of
scrawling six year old handwriting. It's like, oh my god,
this is our clime on my cerials.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
This is horrible.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
I'm defaced, But it was. It was just very alive
in my house. And so music for Victor is his
his his self discovery as an artist and his growth
as an artist, and is part and parcel of his healing,
not just in terms of his illness but in terms
(17:11):
of his trauma. So getting Hanson's disease wasn't his first trauma.
You know. Victor lived through war, lived through famine, lived
through family separation and immigration and racism and poverty, so
you know, he had already learned to roll with life's
(17:31):
punches by the time he got to Carville. So there's
a certain kind of numbing or self numbing that often occurs,
I think, particularly in those of us who are socialized
male and those of us who are of that generation,
which was technically the silent generation. Actually, my dad was
(17:51):
born in nineteen thirty seven, so you know, there was
no emotional labor whatsoever anywhere. So you know, my dad,
like many of the other patients at Carville, learned to
heavily compartmentalize. And I wanted to portray that in Victor's character,
that he as he explores himself as a musician, that's
(18:14):
a way for him to reintegrate the parts that had
been separated in order to survive. You know, as we
all know, coping mechanisms become maladaptive over time. So Victor
is discovering that his coping mechanisms up until that point
had stopped working, and then he found a way into
(18:36):
his art in order to heal and grow from that.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I love seeing the growth through that musicality, through discovering
more about himself. And also I'm curious whether the process
of writing this book. You know, you say that you
were familiar with your dad's story since for as long
as you can remember. Did the process of writing this
book kind of give you any more insight or understand
(19:00):
into his experiences or was there more that you learned
that you were surprised to learn while putting this book together?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Oh so much of both. I think in order to
perform that hat trick around music, that was my way
into the character and to very fully empathizing with him,
Because in order to portray what it is to discover
oneself as a musician and to start to play and
(19:27):
start to compose, I had to find a way to
bridge my own experience discovering myself as a young poet
and discovering poetry and writing it. I had to transpose
that into Victor's discovery of music and writing music. So
within that process, I think there was a kind of
(19:48):
deep identification that happened, a kind of transference, if you will,
And there was a kind of intense empathy that was
created between me and my understanding of my father at
that age. That and also my dad and I took
a trip to Carville in twenty sixteen to do research together,
(20:10):
and that was his first time back in fifty three years,
which was really remarkable. After he was discharged, he went
back to New York, which many of his peers did
not do because, unlike my dad, most of his peers
did not have a home to go back to. They
were so fully estranged from their families that they chose
to stay in the only home that they had that
(20:32):
and also there was a possibility of federal funding for educations.
Some of his peers went to LSU, for example, which
Victor is grappling with towards the end of the book.
But my dad went to New York, and in his
exit interview, as in most exit interviews at that time
in the nineteen sixties, he was told to not look
(20:55):
behind and to look ahead, and to forget about his experience,
and to not tell any one that he had been
in Carville, to not tell anyone that he had had
hands ends, because if he wanted to reintegrate into society,
if he wanted to get a job, get married, move
forward in life like a quote unquote regular person, he
(21:16):
would have to leave that behind and recompartmentalize as it were.
So this was, you know, a sort of official advice,
which is somewhat contradictory, self contradictory because at the same time,
there were services outside of cardal to help patients reintegrate.
You know, for example, my dad's first job when he
(21:37):
got back to New York was through the American leoprosy Mission,
I believe, So there were still ties. It wasn't a
complete severing, but there was this code of silence that
was institutionalized.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Having that be sort of the official guidance precisely, it's
a surprising but also not surprising. But just said, I
think in a way that like this is something because
what it does is just further the shame and stigma
surrounding Hanson's.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
And I think that also circles back to partially answering
one of your previous questions about why this place and
this incredible achievement of federally funded medicine is so unsung. Right, Yeah,
I think it contributes to that. And you know, for
what it's worth, it was realistic, right it was. I
(22:28):
don't think that five hundred patients, only a handful of
whom we're going to leave the institution, were they to
reintegrate into their original home environments. I don't think it's
realistic to assume that they could just be loud and
proud that they just didn't have the numbers to do so,
(22:48):
and to face the intensity of the taboo and stigma
around leprosy that still exists today. It actually still exists
today and stops people from coming forward to seek treating. Meant,
I think it's somewhat realistic. Sad, but realistic.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Let's take a quick break here, We'll be back before
you know it. Welcome back, everyone. I'm here chatting with
(23:24):
the wonderful Wendy chin Tanner about her book King of
the Armadillas. Let's get into some more questions. And that
kind of gets me to another question that I had
about sort of the state of Hanson's disease in the
nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, and just sort of a if
we could go through a general overview. First, you know
what causes Hanson's disease, what are that some of the symptoms,
(23:46):
and then what treatments were available to someone at that time.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yes, so Hanson sees is the bacterial infection that left
untreated will attack the nervous system, Initially symptoms arise around lesions,
skin lesions, but it can also attack the nerves, which
it did in my dad. So my dad had bilateral
ulnar nerve surgery in his arms and hands, which was
(24:13):
fairly common. But in terms of the nerve disorder part
of it, it will attack the extremities, so hands, feet, fingers, toes,
the areas of the body that are colder. It can
also cause blindness, which it did in Stanley Stein, who
was the inspiration, the real life inspiration for the character
(24:34):
Herb Climb. So it can cause a range of symptoms,
particularly if left untreated for a very long time. Leprosy
is very interesting in that ninety five percent of the
population is naturally immute and it has a very low communicability,
so even the five percent who are susceptible require prolonged
(24:57):
contact close prolonged contact in order to contract it. So
it is not a public health issue at all, actually,
and we've known that even before the cure. But then
in nineteen forty one Carville discovered the cure, the Miracle
of Carville, which is sulfa drugs promen that enabled people
(25:19):
to be fully cured. So from nineteen forty one on,
there was absolutely no need for quarantine. There was no
need for quarantine before that, but from nineteen forty one
on they knew scientifically that there was no need for quarantine,
and yet quarantine persisted until the nineteen sixties. So what
(25:40):
does that tell us? That tells us that this is
politically based and not scientifically based. Nothing makes people panic
quite like leprosy.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
It's true. And I was wondering also about Carville. And
so if someone was diagnosed, let's say, you know, when
your dad was diagnosed with Hanson's disease, what options were
available to someone? Clearly, you know there was this fear
based quarantine aspect of it, but depending on age, on
socioeconomic status, on your race, on where you lived, what
(26:14):
sort of options were available.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
I mean everyone was sent to Carville. Actually with the diagnosis,
everyone was sent to Carville, which is which is amazing
because then in Carville, having Hanson's disease was the great leveler.
So Carville became this incredible microcosm of the United States.
It was racially diverse, and it was also socioeconomically diverse,
(26:41):
and it was diverse in terms of class. So you
had people there who were literally socialized before entering Carville,
and you had people who were a.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Literate That's incredible.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yes, it's absolutely incredible. And that also speaks to Carville
as a social experiment.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Going back to the discussions that we've been having surrounding
shame and stigma at Carville, because everyone that you're around
also has Hanson's disease, understands maybe some of the aspects
of stigma and shame, which then might alleviate some of that.
But at the same time, you're on the grounds that
are surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Yes, how did
(27:19):
that sort of dynamic influence daily life at Carville and
the interaction with the surrounding town.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
I think there was very little interaction with the surrounding
town except in these sort of furtive forays out. So
there was there was a bar that was down the
river road, a kind of dive bar called the Red
Rooster that patients would sneak out of a hole in
the fence to get to. And they would also sneak
(27:48):
out of the hole in the fence to go fishing
on the Mississippi River or to go have picnics on
the banks of the Mississippi River, and also to abscond,
so some people did had run off for various reasons,
either to get married and then come back in or
to just you know, book it, either home or elsewhere,
(28:10):
and if they were caught and returned, then they would
have to stay in the Carville jail for thirty days,
the Cargal jail. Yes, but so within the confines of
the institution you had during its heyday, which were the
nineteen fifties, the period that I'm writing about, about five
hundred patients, and it functioned like a small town in
(28:32):
and of itself, so it was completely self contained. It
had its own working dairy, it had its own post office,
it had two churches, It had a school where my
dad finished high school. And it had all of the
amenities of a small liberal arts college or of a
country club, you know. It had a golf course, it
(28:54):
had a lake, it had a pool, it had a theater,
it had a movie theater, it had a volleyball court,
it had a softball diamond. I mean everything you can
think of a golf course, you know, all the things.
And it had a press where they published an internationally
circulated magazine. So it was a world unto itself. It
(29:17):
was completely self contained. So for the most part, day
to day life was very normal, you know, and human
beings have this incredible capacity to normalize almost anything. But
in reality, in the nineteen fifties, the quality of life
was very high and it was really just like small
town America.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
It sounds like a very progressive place relative to the
time and the location that the surrounding location.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yes, it was integrated at a time when the South
was segregated, so right outside that fence there was segregation
and Jim Crow and you know, the high school was
a Benetton ad. I'm showing my age by saying that
the high school was.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Very much age by knowing what you mean. That's amazing.
Everyone who was diagnosed with Hanson's disease was sent to
Carville and then had to spend a certain amount of
time there, despite you know, as you mentioned, there being
sulfa drugs that would essentially eliminate the need for any
(30:21):
sort of quarantine. At what point did they leave. What
was that process like for being released from Carville.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Well, until the nineteen sixties, it was. It was a
very arduous process that was once again scientifically speaking, not necessary.
So patients had to have monthly skin smear tests to
see how much of the Hansen's basilie they still had
in their system, and they required twelve consecutive negative tests
(30:53):
in order to be considered for discharge.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
And negative meanings no bacteria whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Correct, So you could, in essence, get eleven negatives and
then suddenly test positive and then you were right back
to square one. But you know, even after the twelfth
negative test, you had to go before the board and
you had to you know, have the go ahead of
(31:20):
the physicians and the medical officer in charge in order
to then be officially discharged.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
That does sound like a hugely frustrating process, and as
you beautifully describe in your book, this anxious awaiting of
each month, what's going to happen, what's it going to show?
What does that mean for my future? This unknowing about
what will happen, and just sort of being beholden to that.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
So in some ways it made sense that some people
just kind of gave up and decided I'm just going
to stay here forever, because this is kind of the
good life anyway. Yeah, and there's also this actually a
psychological phenomenon around institutional lifezation of becoming so accustomed to
(32:04):
incarceration essentially that you become indoctrinated or interpolated into that system,
and you are fearful of returning to society even if
you can. You know, Carville was a federally funded institution
that amazingly had both the funds and the wish to
(32:28):
allow patients to choose whether they would be discharged or stay,
even after they were technically able to be discharged. So
a lot of people did choose to stay, including Stanley Stein.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Which I would love to talk more about Stanley Stein,
because Yeah, Herb is one of my favorite characters in
your book. I loved him, and I was very curious
to know more about the real life person that this
character is based on. So what can you tell me
about Stanley?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yes, so, Herb client is based on a real lie,
disabled gay Jewish American hero whose name was Stanley Stein.
And you know, he was a closeted gay man at
the time, but it was you know, it was an
unspoken truth. And interestingly too, even though he was living
(33:20):
with a man and it was generally known that, you know,
he was a gay man. He was the head of
the patient's Federation, He was the founding editor and editor
in chief of the Star magazine, and you know, he
was the de facto mayor of Carville. Basically, he was
(33:40):
a pharmacist from a small town in Texas and in
the nineteen thirties he was diagnosed with Hanson's disease and
he was sent to Carville, and this was ten years
before the cure. So he lived with the disease for
so long that he became permanently disabled. So by the
(34:03):
time my dad got there in the nineteen fifties and
met him in the infirmary, Stanley was unable to walk
without a caine. Eventually he would be unable to walk
at all. And he was blind and he couldn't even
read Braille because his fingertips had become so desensitized from
the disease that he had to have everything read out
(34:27):
loud to him. So my dad and Victor in the
book volunteered to be one of his readers. So he
would read everything from his correspondence to newspapers to proofs
of the articles, which he would then edit, you know,
and yeah, it was really extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
That is that is amazing. And I also just love
that your dad liked Victor in your book actually had
this like close relationship.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yes, and in real life too, Stanley became somehow he
was incredibly charismatic and charming, just this uncon commonly charismatic
and charming man, and he became pen pals, initially with
Hollywood star Telula Bankhead, and then they became besties in
(35:13):
real life. I have archival photos of Stanley and Tallula.
There was a point at which Stanley went on leave
and he and Tallula were in New York going to parties,
going to Broadway shows. There are pictures of Tallula sitting
on his lap. I mean, it's really incredible. And so
Tallula became his sort of Hollywood spokesperson for the Star magazine,
(35:38):
and she strong armed all of her friends to subscribe,
and it grew from being a sort of, as Stanley
called it, a gossip brag within Carville itself, to having
ninety thousand subscribers all around the world.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
First of all, I really want to see those pictures.
They sound amazing. And secondly, I love that spread of
the Star magazine. How how huge that got? So what
was in this magazine? What sort of articles were there?
What information was presented?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
So it was founded just a couple of years after
Stanley got to Carville. And what was really interesting about
that was kind of stumbling into you know, what I
like to think of as euros. Euros in the sense
of life force, not just libido. Right. So, and Eros
stands in the contradiction to Tanatos, which is the death drive. Right.
(36:33):
So Carville was all about eros. It was all about imagination,
creative endeavor. You know. Not only was Stanley really interested
in musical theater and you know, he was involved in
place and stuff like that, but he found it within
a couple of years of getting to Carvil, the Star magazine.
He had been interested in journalism before getting to Carville.
(36:57):
He had dabbled in it, but his father was pharmacists,
so he became a pharmacist, and so he was a
bit of a frustrated creative who then was able to
blossom as a fully fledged creative when he got to Carville,
which was really interesting. So it started really small, just
a locally circulated, you know, within Carville sort of magazine,
(37:19):
and over time it had a bigger mission. And the
mission was to shine a light on the truth of
Hanson's disease and restore dignity.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
To its sufferers.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
So I think Stanley basically took the Star as an
opportunity to show the outside world what was happening within Carville,
show the outside world what patient life really was like,
to reduce the stigma around Hansen's to talk about the
(37:51):
newest discoveries and things like that. But he also, I
think used it very brilliantly to put the screw to
the administration when he and the Patients Federation were advocating
for higher quality of life, because you know, while it
(38:12):
was mostly a progressive place, it wasn't always so, and
the quality of life for patients was almost entirely dictated
by the medical officer in charge. So it was either
a benevolent dictatorship or it was not. So there were
some times in which, you know, you had this kind
(38:35):
of golden Age or you know Carvilion Renaissance of culture.
If you had a medical officer in charge who like
doctor Johansson after which the lake is named because he
built it for the patients, there was a kind of
blossoming of normalcy and culture and arts. And he was,
(38:56):
you know, very slack about people going out the hole
in the fence, and he allowed for leaves and vacations
and things like that, because you know, he was science
based and he was also very empathy based. After he retired,
another guy came in, doctor Gordon, who was, you know,
a real stickler for the rules, and he reinstituted all
(39:21):
of these really draconian rules, and he cracked down on
everything from dancing to dating and the married cottages where
you know, married people lived. And Stanley and his quote
unquote friends, Oh my god, yeah, yeah, so he yes,
he was the only bachelor living in the married cottages.
(39:44):
But so doctor Gordon tried to crack down on all
of this, and the Patients Federation organized. They utilized a
lot of the same tactics that the civil rights movement
was using. They had sit ins, they had strod imagine
my dad being a seventeen year old, eighteen year old
very excited about making signs and having sit ins and strikes.
(40:07):
And Stanley also utilized the Star to publicize what was happening,
the conditions that they were dealing with within Carville. And
so there was external pressure and the Patient's Federation was
able to use connections that he cultivated to hire a
(40:31):
lawyer who went to the Hill to speak on their
behalf and also a local politician to go to the
hill and speak on their behalf and within only four
years they managed to kick this guy out.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Oh my god, amazing.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Yeah, the most marginalized of marginalized people.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yes, And to think what one and I know that
it was it was many people involved, but to have
that sort of to have Stanley spearheading this one person
can do and achieve is amazing to think about.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
And also what solidarity and coalitionism can achieve. Because within
the Patient's Federation there were a lot of differing opinions,
a lot of differing political opinions and ideologies and religions
and whatnot. I mean, you could have very much had
factions and schisms and you know what we're seeing now
(41:27):
for example in our country at large. You could have
had that. But they had the opposite. They had solidarity.
They had a cause, a common cause, a common enemy,
I guess, a common cause that they coalesced around and
they made things happen. And so I think that this
experience at such a formative time for my dad really
(41:51):
made him the man that he became. You know, Like
my dad likes to call himself a radical, and he's
you know, after he was discharged, he protested the Vietnam War.
He marched with Doctor Gang. He protested multiple wars with me,
and he was down at Occupy Wall Street, much to
my mother's chagrin because you know, there were a lot
(42:15):
of arrests that were happening, and you know, he was
already somewhat elderly by that point, but he didn't care.
He was down there with his camera. So I think
that is the legacy of Cargo. You know, he became
a very politically engaged citizen.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
And just the power too of the people that you
surround yourself with at a formative time of your life.
And that kind of brings me to this this idea
that I love that comes through in your book so much,
these themes of family and the complexities of family and
found family and Victor in your book, one of his
(42:54):
found family members is her, but he also has these
these other individuals that make the up. And I wanted
to ask you more about that, whether that is you know,
from how you chose that for Victor, or how Victor
told you that's what he needed, and what that reflected about,
you know, life at Carville, the population at Carville, and
(43:14):
also your dad's experience.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah, I mean those questions are somewhat entwined. You know,
my dad left my grandmother behind when he was eight
years old, like Victor, and his father was in reality
even more sort of distant emotionally from him than Sam
in the book. So my dad and Victor were both
(43:39):
very very hungry for connection and very very hungry for mentorship,
and I wanted to portray that in Victor. I wanted
to show him as this, you know, very sensitive kid
who was looking everywhere he could for found family, not
just mentorship, but looking for father figures, looking for mother figures,
(44:02):
and he found them. I think in reality in Carville
there was also that sort of mentorship, particularly of young
patients who were separated from their families, so they were
sort of adopted and taken under the wing of older patients.
So these sorts of informal found families and informal adoptions
(44:23):
would happen in real life. There. Another one of the
found family members that Victor has in the book is
sister Helen, who is based also on a real person,
sister Hilary Ross, who was a very accomplished research scientist
who was also the head of the lab and did
(44:43):
all of the medical photography, and she was instrumental in
helping to find the cure in nineteen forty one. So
I wanted to kind of fold her into this story
as well.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about
Victor's how his life is just sort of punctuated by
trauma after trauma, and you know, with his diagnosis of
Hanson's disease being one of them. And you do such
an incredible job of letting the reader experience this physical
pain through Victor's eyes, through his body, his discomfort, his isolation,
(45:19):
that he feels this loneliness, who like, I don't know
any of these people, what is this place? What do
I do here? And then also just not knowing what's
happening to him his body because the doctors are at
the time very paternalistic and not really feeling. It's important
to let the patient know what is happening. How all
of these feelings are also wrapped up in his experience
(45:43):
as a Chinese immigrant. So I wonder if you could
just talk a little bit about all of these different
the swirls of emotion, this with this aspect of his identity.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yes, I mean, it's also bound up in his experience
as an adolescent, Yes, because he's becoming a man. So
I wanted to think about Carville as a sort of
liminal space, you know, as the in between place that
everyone goes through during rites of passage. So it is
(46:14):
a liminal space between Victor's boyhood and manhood. It's a
liminal space between Victor's illness and wellness. So that's one
aspect of it, and other aspect of the racial aspect
is very interesting. So there was a very large Asian
population at Carville, and when I was researching oral histories
(46:39):
in particular, because you know, that was actually one of
the pieces of research material that was the most rich
for me in terms of helping me understand aspects that
I couldn't find otherwise. For the book, I couldn't find
a single firsthand narrative by an Asian patient, even though
(46:59):
there was such a significantly large population of them. I
don't know if that was because of self selected abstinence,
if that was institutional neglect or something you know, more
nefarious around, you know, just blatant racism. I don't know.
I can't say, but I know that there was a
hole in the record, and so you know, not only
(47:21):
did I feel compelled to fill it, but I felt
compelled to dive even deeper into it. So another thing
that I didn't know until I started researching around the
history of the book, not just around the history of Carville,
was that there is a long relationship in America in
(47:41):
anti Asian hate, between stigmatization of illness, specifically leprosy, and
anti Asian hate. So I discovered, for example, that in
the nineteenth century there was a labor leader named Dennis
Kearney in San Francisco. Dennis Kearney was an Irish immigrant,
(48:04):
which is perhaps ironic that he was also an immigrant,
but you know, he was the ahead of a labor
movement that was pushing for the Exclusion Act to happen
because you know, the Chinese laborers were strike breaking and
they were taking white jobs, et cetera, et cetera, so
you know, part of the racial pecking order of that time,
(48:26):
because Irish immigrants were also not considered fully white. So
you know, that's that's another sort of nuanced intersectional aspect
of this. So at one point Dennis Kearney couldn't get
enough traction with just your usual narratives of taking white
jobs and selling opium and you know, running brothels. So
(48:50):
he found a Chinese man who had lesions on his face,
and he marched him through the streets of San Francisco
and said, if we don't kick out the Chinese, they're
going to give us all leprosy. So disease stigma globally
and throughout history has been a tool, a propaganda tool
(49:13):
for exclusion of particular groups. But so this leprosy story
and the relationship between leprosy and the Chinese population has
persisted from that point on. So, following on the heels
of Dennis Kearney and the Exclusion Act that was passed
in eighteen eighty two, the Joseph Jones, who was the
(49:36):
former head of Louisiana State's Department of Public Health, went
on the record to spread misinformation and he said on
the public record that Chinese laundrymen in New York City.
How he would know that, I don't know, But in
New York City and in New Orleans had a habit
(49:57):
of spitting water on on the clothes that they were ironing,
and thus spreading leprosy to all of their customers. So
you know, as you can probably imagine the media ate
this up. This is very mosationalist clickbait, if you will.
And this story was recycled over and over again. I
(50:19):
found incidents of it in the nineteen forties and even
in the nineteen fifties. So yeah, it was regurgitated again
and again because you know, it's very it's spicy.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
It's yeah, it is. It is amazing how history I
mean maybe doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and it's just
it's something that I feel like we're saying a lot
in the podcast, like misinformation has been around forever and
it is a tool or disinformation, yes, specifically a tool,
and there is an agenda behind it.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
I will say too that as a result of the
Exclusion Act, family separation for Asian families Asian American families
should say, persisted for generations. So in my dad's case,
for example, the first immigrant in my family to come
to the United States was in eighteen forty nine, the
(51:12):
gold Rush. But as a result of exclusion laws, Chinese
men would stay in the States and then go back
to China. Periodically. They would get married, they might have children,
and they would bring their male children to the States.
So you would have generations three, four, five generations of
(51:34):
families that were separated. And what do you think this
does to the psychology of people? What do you think
this does to their capacity to, you know, not only
parent themselves, but to form healthy relationships. It's a psychological
wound that we see within the community that is persistent
(51:56):
for you know, decades and decades and decades rational harm.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Yes, from this. And there are so many different things
that I feel like people can take away from your book,
so many important lessons, so much that we can learn
from Carville. And we could probably spend another hour talking
about all of those. But I wanted to ask you
what your big hope is, if you have one, for
(52:22):
what people take away from this book.
Speaker 2 (52:25):
Wow, that's a big question. I mean, I think it's twofold,
you know. On the one hand, on a more sort
of philosophical level, perhaps I would want people to take
away the idea or the truth that people are people
wherever we are, whether that's in an eighteenth century castle
(52:45):
in France, or it's in a federal institution for the
treatment of lepersy in the nineteen fifties, or if it's
in twenty twenty five in New York City. We all
have the same hopes and desires and dreams, and all
the same capacity to love and to do harm, and
to make mistakes and live with the consequences of them.
(53:08):
This sort of thread of persistent humanity that the patients
at Carville, that the people that I portrayed in the book,
are more than their circumstances. So that's on a philosophical level.
On a more concrete level, I think a takeaway that
I would love for people to have, certainly now, is
(53:31):
that Carville is an example of the government doing it right,
government medicine and federally funded science and medicine achieving something
that really did a lot of good and that not
only found the cure quite quickly, but also took care
(53:51):
of thousands and thousands and thousands of patients in a
way that was empathy based and communitarian and positive. As
you said, we don't have to repeat history, but as
Maya Angelou says, you know, when you know better, do better.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
Beautiful words, very apt, such an important message. I really
just really appreciate you taking the time to chat with
me today. Thank you so much. This was such a
great conversation.
Speaker 2 (54:19):
It's my absolute pleasure, and thank you so much for
having me. I truly appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
A big thank you again to Wendy for taking the
time to chat with me. I so enjoyed this conversation
and book. If you like today's episode and would like
to learn more, check out our website this podcast will
kill You dot com. We're I'll post a link to
where you can find King of the Armadillos as tell
us a link to Wendy's website where you can find
her other incredible work, and don't forget you can check
(55:05):
out our website for all sorts of other cool things,
including but not limited to, transcripts Quarantini and Plasybrita recipes,
show notes and references for all of our episodes, links
to merch our bookshop dot org, affiliate account, our Goodreads list,
a first hand account, form and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking
of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music
(55:26):
for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you
to Leona Scualacci and Tom Bryfogel for our audio mixing,
and thanks to you listeners for listening. I hope you
liked this episode and our loving being part of the
TPWKY book Club. A special thank you, as always to
our fantastic patrons. We appreciate your support so very much. Well,
(55:51):
until next time, keep washing those hands. Bum bum bu
bumbo ou
Hosts And Creators
Erin Welsh
Erin Allmann Updyke
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