Cage Door of Harry T. Chimpanzee

Carville was a laboratory as well as a home. Sister Hilary Ross and Dr. George Fite opened a drug-testing lab in 1933, and Dr. Guy Faget's sulfone trials followed between 1940 and 1947, with six patients volunteering for the first Promin doses in March 1941. In 1971 Dr. W. F. Kirchheimer developed the armadillo as a model for a disease like Hansen's. Later work found wild armadillos and many patients in the southern states carry the same strain of the bacterium. What the patients and animals taught the lab traveled far beyond the fence.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 15 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 18 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 18 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 18 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• The STAR (Carville's Patient-Published Newspaper) — steps away
• The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul — steps away
• Triumph At Carville: A Tale of Leprosy in America — steps away
• Staff Housing, U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, Carville — steps away