Tracadie, New Brunswick, Canada (Tracadie-Sheila)
1872 - LEPROSY - A Hundred Years of Plague in a Seaside Town

[St Johns, New Brunswick, Letter to the New York Sun.]

Will Americans believe that leprosy, "the eldest daughter of Death," exists on this continent? Though I had seen something to that effect in the Appleton's Cyclopaedia, I for one did not believe it before I heard of Tracadie.

This is a small village on the marshy fringe of Gloucester county, New Brunswick, about twenty-five miles south of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Landward, the eye rests on a dreary, monotonous level, dotted here and there by wretched fisherman's hovels. Seaward, the low line of the horizon is broken by no sail, and silence broods over the gloomy spread of waters. Tracadie is of French origin, having been settled by Basque colonists soon after the peace of Utrecht, early in the eighteenth century. It was poor and miserable enough from the first, but God's chosen curse fell upon it toward 1760, when a vessel from the Levant was wrecked on its shores, and bales of old clothes, teeming with plague germs, were washed upon the sand. A terrible pestilence broke out and decimated three of the surrounding villages, and, what was worse, its seeds remained. From that day to this Tracadie has never been purged of the malady...

One of my first questions naturally was: Is the disease contagious? AND the answer, to my great relief, was a negative. Under the same roof, the husband may have it, and the wife not, or vice versa. One man had three wives. The first two died of leprosy, and the third was tainted by it, while he remained perfectly sound. In one family, two or three children are leprous; the rest clean. Servants in the hospital, washerwomen and others have not suffered from the malady...

...Neither is the sickness of all hereditary. Leprous parents produce hale children. The wife of a certain Robichaud was covered with ulcers from sole to crown. She became the mother of a daughter whom she nursed at her own breast. Yet the girl grew up, thoroughly clean, married, and all her children are also clean.

Owing to the sparsely settled character of the province of New Brunswick, it was not until 1844 that the attention of the authorities was drawn to Tracadie... Subsequently, the provincial government ordered the establishment of a Lazar House in the neighboring island of Sheldrake, in the Miramichi river. In 1847, however, this hospital was removed to the mainland, about half a mile from the parish church of Tracadie, in a vast inclosure set apart by the government...

The Hon. Hamilton Gordon, late Governor of New Brunswick... ventured his opinion on the origin of the scourge. He attributes it to the FISH DIET of the inhabitants, who, in reality, feed almost wholly on herring, potatoes and turnips, their poverty being so great that there are perhaps not ten families which eat bread. This theory, however, can not hold, for there are villages all along the coast of New Brunswick, even in close proximity to Tracadie, which, though they are equally poor and underfed, have never experienced the attacks of the insidious malady...

The Indianapolis News
Indianapolis, Indiana
March 8, 1872

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