“Triumph at Carville,” a documentary by Sally Squires ’74 that chronicles leprosy on a Louisiana plantation, will air on PBS Friday, March 28 at 10 p.m.
An award-winning, syndicated health columnist for The Washington Post, Squires produced and wrote the film with John Wilhelm. The original music was composed and performed by Grammy Award-winner Béla Fleck.
Squires, who received support for the project while a media fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, calls leprosy “one of the most feared diseases in the world and one of the most misunderstood.” The film tells the story of a group of caregivers who dealt with this public health issue over many decades, beginning in 1894, at the Louisiana leprosarium known as Carville.
Squires made the first of many reporting visits to Carville in 1989, m aking numerous friendships with patients traditionally wary of outsiders. Using contemporary interviews, as well as old radio shows, movie news accounts and other archival materials, including an exclusive trove of photographs taken by a longtime patient, she documents the struggle of patients, nuns, doctors and staff who lived and worked there.
Over the years, the once prison-like facility evolved into a hospital and later into a gated community. From its dedicated researchers came a multi-drug therapy that is considered a cure. Today leprosy is known as Hansen’s disease, named for Gerhard Hansen, the Norwegian discoverer of the bacteria that cause it.
Squires has covered health, medicine and science in Washington since 1981, first for Newhouse Newspaper and later for the Post’s Health section. She serves as a regular television and radio commentator on local and national programs and has been an invited speaker at many national health conferences.
She is the author of “The Secrets of the Lean Plate Club: A Simple Step-by-Step Program to Help You Shed Pounds and Keep Them Off for Good” (2006; based on the weekly column she writes) and “The Art of Healing” (1999). Her articles have appeared in many national publications including Woman’s Day, Modern Maturity, Parade and Reader’s Digest.
Squires holds master’s degrees in journalism and nutrition from Columbia University. In 2004, she became the first journalist named an Honorary Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education.
“Triumph at Carville” is partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. For an interview with Squires about the film, go to: http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/hcast_index.cfm?display=detail&hc=2520