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Douglas
Hi,
My turn again, and late as is typical of the whole lot of us; we operate on
'Stanford Standard Time.' I am going to write about Chacachacare, but first I
will give you a bit of history.
In the 1842, the island was given to the Dominican Order of nuns, who ran a
school that was built (along with a presbytery) in 1880. In 1915, the British
Government decided that leprosy (Hansen's Disease) was contagious and that all
of the lepers should be shipped off somewhere to die, away from everybody else
(leprosy, by the way is thought to be caught from armadillos.) So, in 1920,
police stormed a hospital and forcefully took all the lepers of Trinidad to
Chacachacare, where those fit for work helped build the facilities for a full
service lepresarium. The Dominican Sisters looked after things until they (the
Sisters) left 1950. In the '80s, a 'cure' was discovered, and all the lepers and
everyone else left, leaving behind many personal belongings.
We arrived in the island around a week ago and anchored in a tiny cove, just off
of the Doctor's House. That particular house seems to be a party spot - lots of
broken bottles; the walls riddled with bullet-holes (?). The nun's place was
more interesting, made up of three huge houses on a high point. The largest one
was full of tiny rooms and corridors, the inner ones rather dark. The whole
house was completely made of wood, most of it rotting slightly making you pick
your step with care. The wind was up, so shutters banged, trees scraped against
the roof, and floorboards and beams creaked - I kept on imagining something
jumping out at me. Not much in the way of personal belongings about however.
The next spot that we looked at was the village. The first thing we went into
was a doctor's office, the entire floor littered with different coloured medical
reports. Some were patient cards identifying a person and recording tests, some
were injection record cards. The most interesting were the patient status
reports, such as 'tested positive for tubercular leprosy...patient very
uncooperative, and experiencing excruciating pain...patient dead.' Disturbing
stuff.
The most amazing find was the dispensary. It was just upstairs from the
hospital, and on rather less than perfect floors. Hundreds of tiny bottles of
Promin Solution were on shelves and on the floor, some even in unopened boxes of
25, we reckoned that there were well above 500 bottles there, as well as tablets
of something or other and penicillin. There were ordering records there too,
with lists of different drugs, such as 18,000 aspirin, morphine, codeine - seems
as if leprosy was painful! We were wondering what the deal was with Promin
(could it be the cure that removed the need for the colony?) until someone found
a few pages from a medical reference titled 'Promin in Leprosy,' this is a
little too weird!!!Why did they leave thousands of drugs lying about? And what
about the personal patient records, doesn't leaving them about defy the
Hippocratic Oath?
The whole place was very strange, and although it was very interesting, I was
somewhat relieved to be on our way.
That is all for this time, I will leave telling about here for the next one up.
Douglas
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