The 19-year-old, recently engaged New Orleans woman was at the peak of her youth in the Christmas season of 1927 when she noticed pale, rose-colored spots on her legs—spots indicative of leprosy. Formally known as Hansen’s disease, leprosy is a mildly communicable chronic bacterial infection typically acquired in childhood that, over a period of years or decades, affects one’s peripheral nerves, skin, upper respiratory tract, and eyes, resulting in blindness, disfiguring skin lesions, and absorption of the bones and cartilage of fingers, toes, ears, and noses.1 Beginning in 1921, leprosy was, in all states but New York, grounds for isolation and treatment at the Public Health Service Hospital in Carville, Louisiana.2,3 Assured of a rapid cure by her fiance, in January 1928 the newly-diagnosed woman entered Carville. She left without a word except to her closest family members and a single friend, who would keep the secret of her diagnosis. Thus, “Betty Parker” was created. She would hide her true identity from all but the most intimate friends within the confines of Carville. The loss of identity seemed, initially, temporary; Parker was unable to predict she would be confined to Carville for the next two decades of her life. Parker’s story is framed by unfolding medical as well as social and political change over the course of the decades immediately before and following World War II. From the 1920s through the 1950s, from 1,500 to 5,000 people in the United States were estimated to have Hansen’s disease (in contrast to 108 known new U.S. cases since 1999).4 When Parker was first confined, the sole treatment for leprosy was Chaulmoogra oil—a foul smelling and largely ineffective tree extract that patients could opt to take either orally (at the price of extreme nausea) or by injection (at the risk of developing local abscesses). When Parker arrived at the start of the Great Depression, those confined at Carville shared little in common other than a sense of isolation and hopelessness. With the dawn of the antibiotic age in the early 1940s, however, the therapeutic prospects for those with leprosy were radically altered. With new hopes for recovery, the experience of confinement at Carville consequently changed. But therapeutic advance alone does not explain the shifts in the patient experience at Carville during the 1940s. A sense of community, after all, implies not just notions of association or connection to other people, but also common understandings of the fundamental political, social, and economic rights and entitlements of American citizens. Thus, the changing social context of the nation—from Depression, to World War, to Cold War—interacted with therapeutic change to profoundly shape the experience of community and confinement at Carville.