Title: Professor, Medical Rhetoric and Writing Studies
University: Louisiana State University
Email: bheiffe@gmail.com
Twitter: N/A
Website: http://www.lsu.edu/hss/english/people/heifferon.php
Description of Work:
My work in some ways does not fully represent my interests, as I am interested in all areas of health, medicine and how language works within those areas. One area that has captured my attention has always been epidemics. Large contagions change cultures. I’ve been very curious about how communication about those diseases explores ways to “manage” and learn from them. On the other hand, epidemics illicit interesting controversial rhetorics, scapegoating and verbal sparring among bio-scientists charged with coming up with preventatives and treatments.
Looking back on my last twenty four years in medical rhetoric, some of my best and most rewarding work has been in technical writing classes that I turned into health project classes. Through service learning and with a Director of a clinic, my students and I completed a plethora of health-related projects: health fairs, slide presentations to government agencies, community brochures, surveys presented to corporations and translation materials for farmworkers and the health professionals serving them.
Lately, my interests have gravitated toward medical history. We live amidst great advances and tragic inequalities that did not evolve overnight. Working in the archives lets me hunt for nuggets of insights. Here’s where I can tease out those cultural changes and social impacts that have formed what we call Western biomedicine.
Lastly, I’ve been reflecting on my former career as a cardio-pulmonary technician and specials procedures nurse (Not as an R. N. but cross-trained as part of an emergency team). Communication was important to me as I often verbally prepped those patients who were conscious and coherent for procedures. I learned to read my audience, which is why rhetoric made so much sense to me.
Symposium Submission:
PROPOSAL FOR DISCOURSES CONFERENCE 2017
This proposal for a work in progress centers on a chapter for a new book project titled From Stigma to Success: Louisiana’s Leprosy History. The text begins by analyzing the debate surrounding the expulsion of patients from New Orleans upriver to the old Indian Camp Plantation with its dilapidated structures and swamp-filled acreage. Not long afterwards, the Sisters of Charity arrived to assist the ill patients. The archives from this period have already yielded many documents, journals and letters that deserve to see the light of day and have much to teach us about healthcare, sacrifice and difficult conditions in this early leprosarium on the mainland of the U.S. As I review this history and rhetorically analyze the numerous artefacts, an important story and rich data are revealed to teach us about our stigmatization behaviors as well as those whose valiant efforts sought to reverse the rejection of suffering individuals. Ironically, as this case study will reveal, even with the state’s concentration of the disease as well as the draw of an isolated area for early treatment from elsewhere, the stigma over time loosens its hold and creates opportunities for important research that today has resulted in the most advanced and effective treatments of Hansen’s Disease (formerly known as leprosy) in the world. Louisiana continues today to be the national center for this important research as well as a world-renown treatment center for patients. In addition, the old site of the leprosarium at Carville, Louisiana houses the National Museum for Hansen’s Disease with a virtually untapped, extensive archive of texts and records from the late 1800’s until today. Moving from the earliest available research in the state’s various archives to a series of interviews I’m continuing to conduct, this book project will result in an important addition to our understandings not only of a particularly stigmatized disease but also of the dedication and bravery of patients, religious figures, scientists, social workers and others who have turned a painful rejection of human suffering to successful treatments that can keep the disease at bay and, if treated in time, will no longer be debilitating or even visible.
My argument is an analytical one that argues that the establishment of a separate institution for patients with leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) both increased the othering of a group of people and yet also enabled the separate research that would eventually result not in a cure but in effective treatments that saved sufferers from disfigurement, pain and disability. Pamphlets, bills, legislation and an 1890s Daily Picayune newspaper exposé were all part of the rhetoric that necessitated the departure of leprosy patients from New Orleans in 1892 and from the usual medical practice of quarantining them within already established pest houses, including in the old smallpox hospital in New Orleans. Following the virulent controversy, all patients in the smallpox hospital with leprosy were forcibly removed upriver to an abandoned plantation called Indian Camp in the middle of former agricultural lands.
When the first Sisters of Charity arrived at Indian Camp in 1894, Sister Beatrice had written in her diary that “The lepers watched the boat…until we finally stepped out. We told them that we had come to stay, wishing to do all that we could to comfort their lonely, suffering condition. It was touching to see the happiness of these poor people when they caught sight of the Sisters . . . ‘Have you really, really come to stay with us?’ they kept repeating?” (Annals n.p.). The removal of patients was based on a fear of contagion, a lack of understanding of the disease of leprosy itself and its transmission, as well as stigma. At that point in time, they were referred to not as patients, but as inmates, indicating even more persuasively that there was more emphasis on keeping them away from the citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes because of fear of contagion than on caring for their needs. The fear was also fueled by Biblical teachings that further stigmatized this group of sufferers whose disfigured limbs and faces advertised their disease. The Hebrew word tsara’ath, from the Bible was translated as Lepra into Greek and Latin. It means to be stricken or defiled. My analysis of primary texts can reveal more causes of the stigmatization as well as the actors involved in this move of the patients upriver. Louisiana’s history with leprosy and the case study of Carville has received a minimum of attention in the state and the nation but deserves more analysis.
The arrival of the Sisters, however, did not mean that the patients’ living conditions were one hundred percent improved. Instead, because the U.S. government had not yet taken ownership of the facility (and did not do so until 1921), the Sisters had to spend twenty-five years advocating for even the basic supplies needed for the patients. The relationships between the sufferers and sisters were also not always without problems, and I plan to rhetorically analyze the legal documents that resulted from a serious investigation of proselytizing complaints lodged by non-Catholic patients. Thus my first chapter covers the forced removal and rhetorical analyses of the letters the sisters wrote to one another as well as back to the Mother House. Their discursive practices both reveal and obfuscate the realities and stigmas they encounter on a daily basis.
Other documents in my analyses for later chapters will include memoirs by former patients and families, e.g.: Betty Martin’s Miracle at Carville published in 1950; Stanley Stein’s and Lawrence Blochman’s Alone No Longer: The Story of a Man Who Refused to be One of the Living Dead in 1963; Dr. Paul W. Brand’s books in 1973 and 1980; Jose Ramirez, Jr.s’ Squint: My Journey with Leprosy in 2009 and Claire Manes’ Out of the Shadow of Leprosy: The Carville Letters and Stories of the Landry Family in 2013. In addition, other texts include: diaries, histories, records of the Daughters of Charities, the Daily Picayune, pamphlets against the pest houses and medical reports. (1000 words)
Barbara Heifferon Faculty/LSU bheiffe@gmail.com I use critical theory (postmodernism and embodiment) in historic contexts.