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Toussaint (c. 1890 – after 1934) was the chief of a leper colony in South America, known for his appearance in the novel Papillon. The semi-autobiographical novel recounts the escape of Henri Charrière from the French penal colony of Devil's Island in French Guiana. In 1934, Charrière, with his fellow prisoners Clusiot and Maturette ...
A leper colony, also known by many other names, is an isolated community for the quarantining and treatment of lepers, people suffering from leprosy. M. leprae , the bacterium responsible for leprosy, is believed to have spread from East Africa through the Near East , Europe , and Asia by the 5th century before reaching the rest of the world ...
The book is an account of a 14-year period in Papillon's life (October 26, 1931, to October 18, 1945), beginning when he was wrongly convicted of murder in France and sentenced to a life of hard labor at the Bagne de Cayenne, the penal colony of Cayenne in French Guiana known as Devil's Island. He eventually escaped from the colony and settled ...
Making her first visit to Crete to see the village where her mother was born, Alexis discovers that the village of Plaka faces the small, now deserted island of Spinalonga. Alexis is shocked and surprised to learn the deserted island was Greece's leper colony for much of the 20th century. It is here that Alexis meets an old friend of her mother ...
The island was declared an archeological site in 1976, and some demolition took place in the late 1970s. [4] Born has stated that the Greek state of the period "...seeking to erase the stain on their reputation, wanted to destroy all evidence of the leper colony." [13] By the 1980s some tourists were starting to visit the island. Several plans ...
The trio would reach a leper colony on Pigeon Island, where they were given a boat and sailed to Colombia, where they were recaptured. After several other escape attempts, they would be extradited back to French Guiana. Charrière eventually escaped to freedom in 1941 and write about his experience in the bestselling book Papillon. [77]
Europeans briefly farmed the island in 1851, before it was turned into a quarantine station in 1875, [5] a hospital during the influenza epidemic of 1907, [2] and a small leper colony from 1906 to 1925. [6] During its time as a leper colony, fourteen men were sent there, and two died there. Ivon Skelton arrived in 1919. [6]
In 1889 Stevenson also visited the leper colony on the island of Molokaʻi and met Father Damien there. Therefore, he had a first-hand experience from the fate of lepers. [6] Several times Stevenson uses the Hawaiian word Haole, which is the usual term for Caucasians, for example describing the last owner of the bottle. [7]