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= Stanley Stein = Stanley Stein (born Sidney Maurice Levyson; June 10, 1899 -- December 15, 1967) was a social reformer who helped change the American perspective on leprosy and founded The Sixty-six Star newspaper at the Carville, Louisiana leprosarium. He contracted leprosy in his twenties and was admitted into the Carville leprosarium in 1931. He lived into his sixties but passed away from complications of his illness.

Birth
Stein was born on June 10, 1899 to Jewish parents Albert and Isabelle (née Stein) Levyson in Gonzales, Texas. Isabelle Levyson was an immigrant from Germany.

Stein's grandfather, Paul Levyson, had served with Waul's Texas Legion at the Siege of Vicksburg. He was a member of the Confederate Veterans. He ran the general store in Gonzales, and his son Albert Levyson became manager of the general store despite being a registered pharmacist.

When Stein was five-years-old, his grandfather retired and moved to San Antonio, causing father Albert Levyson to take over the management of a branch store in Shiner, Texas. The Levyson family did not stay in Shiner long, however, due to Paul Levyson's death by streetcar. Not long afterwards, Stein's father decided to find work in his trained vocation and opened up a drugstore in Boerne, Texas.

Early Years
The Levyson family lived in an apartment attached to the drugstore run by Stein's father in Boerne. Dr. W. T. Reeve was Boerne's mayor at the time, and he had his office in the same building as well. Reeve often took the young Stein on house calls.

One of Dr. Reeve's patients was a woman from an old aristocratic German family, who had leprosy. Stein believed leprosy to be something out of the Bible, and the patient haunted Stein's nightmares as a child.

The Levyson family was the only Jewish family in Boerne at the time, and despite his mother being from Germany, the community of Germans in Boerne were slow to accept them. Stein was bullied in public school for being Jewish, which caused him to end up attending the Holy Angels Academy that was run by the Sisters of the Incarnate Word.

Later on, Stein entered Boerne High School, where he came to a crossroads between wanting to become a writer and becoming an actor. He did a weekly column for The Boerne Star, and occasionally wrote a story for The Comfort News in Comfort, Texas.

Education
Stein wanted to attend either the Alviene School of the Theatre in New York or the William H. Mays School of Journalism at the University of Texas, but his father wanted him to become a pharmacist so he could take over the family drugstore. After graduating from high school, Stein enrolled in the University of Texas School of Pharmacy in Galveston.

After Stein received his diploma, he was still too young to get his State Board certificate. Though minors could not practice pharmacy in Texas at the time, his father had Stein's legal minority removed by court action, which enabled Stein to act as an independent adult and help out in his father's drugstore.

Diagonsis and Initial Treatment
In 1919, Stein began working at his family's drugstore. It was during the summer that he first began to show symptoms of leprosy. He would realize upon waking up that his eyes were swollen shut and his face would be puffed and red. The swelling would disappear after a day or two, but the symptoms became a concern for him and his family. When Stein had been at school in Galveston, he had been stung by a Portuguese man o' war and thought the swelling had something to do with that incident, though Dr. Reeve, his personal doctor at the time, denied it. Reeve sent Stein to a specialist in San Antonio, who diagnosed him with hyperacidity and sent him home with antacids.

With Stein's father beginning to fall ill, it fell to his son to take over the pharmacy. Stein too, began to feel overwhelmed with his work, so when a man offered to buy the pharmacy, it seemed very opportune to him. Stein and his mother urged his father to sell the pharmacy so that the family could both relocate and have his father heal in San Antonio. His father reluctantly agreed.

Stein began working at Wagner's Drugstore in San Antonio, Texas when he was twenty-one. The manager of the store, Fay Clubb, was a family friend. Stein became the top pharmacist at the store and excelled in customer service and formed a personable relationship with the local doctors.

Less than a year into working at Wagner's at the end of 1920, Dr. I. L. McGlasson, a top dermatologist in the area, noticed a red spot on Stein's wrist. Stein retold his story of the Portuguese man o' war to the doctor, though the doctor was not convinced it had any correlation with the red spot. McGlasson suggested some radium treatment for the spot, which Stein agreed to. After several sessions, Stein told McGlasson about some reddish-brown spots on his left knee that had been growing darker and bigger in recent days. McGlasson was intrigued, and after examining the spots and doing several tests, he took some skin scrapings to observe under a microscope. McGlasson returned the next day with results from the laboratory, which concluded that Stein had leprosy.

McGlasson was very sympathetic to Stein as the news sunk in. The stigma of leprosy was high at the time, and Stein was not able to conclude how he got exposed to the bacilli. His parents were dismayed at the news, but the diagnosis was overshadowed by the death of his father soon after on December 23, 1921. Stein quit his job and took his mother to Boerne, where she grieved.

Upon his return to San Antonio, Stein began to work at the Botica de San Pedro, a pharmacy owned by his great-uncles Richard and Max Cohn. Whilst working there, Stein was able to pick up some Spanish from the customers who came to the pharmacy. Stein chose to keep his leprosy a secret to most due to heavy stigma. While working at the pharmacy, Stein continued to get treatments from Dr. McGlasson, which included injections of chaulmoogra oil. At the time, chaulmoogra oil was the only treatment available for leprosy.

In 1923, Stein was invited to attend his cousin's wedding in Detroit, and ended up staying in Michigan for five months. Once he returned to San Antonio, he opened his own pharmacy with the money his father left behind, founding the Blanco Road Drug Shop, which became a booming business. Feeling more optimistic about his condition, Stein became active in the San Antonio Little Theater and acted in their first production of Captain Applejack in 1927.

One morning while shaving, Stein noticed pigmentation on his face, and soon his left eye became inflamed. He was sent to an oculist who diagnosed him with conjunctivitis and gave Stein some eye-drops. The eye became worse, and he was diagnosed again, this time with keratitis as his cornea clouded. More patches began to grow on his face.

Around that time, Dr. McGlasson passed away, forcing Stein to switch to Dr. Ferd Lehman for his leprosy treatments. Lehman had been a classmate of Stein's at Galveston, and Stein knew him well enough to know that his condition would be kept secret. However, due to the spots that began to appear on his face, Stein was unsure how much longer he could keep his illness a secret. Stein did not go out in public during the day, and would only go out in the evening to walk his dog. He did end up attending the wedding of his good friend Sidney Berkowitz, though Berkowitz said to him, "As one Sidney to another, will you, for God's sake, go somewhere where there are doctors who can tell you what's the matter with you and do something about it? You're not fooling anyone. You're a sick man. Get well. And if it's money you need, I've got it."

In 1930, Stein traded his drugstore for an equity in an apartment building. The new owner of the store agreed to have his stock inventoried by the San Antonio Drug Company. While Stein was at his store during the inventory process, a man Stein had done business with for years asked about the owner of the business and what ever happened to him. Stein, shocked that the man did not recognize him, knew that he would have to leave San Antonio to find a remedy for his condition.

Treatment in New York
Stein, his mother, and his Boston terrier Michael Dugan, left San Antonio secretly and moved to New York, where they lived with his uncle Berthold Stein at an apartment hotel on Madison Avenue. Stein made an appointment with Dr. Emil Loch, a man that had been recommended to him by Rabbi Ephraim Frisch back in San Antonio. Loch was not sympathetic to Stein's condition, and instead ostracized him, asking him why he came to New York instead of going to Louisiana, where the Carville leprosarium could treat him.

Stein was aware of the leprosarium at Carville, but Dr. McGlasson had turned him off of the idea. Though Stein told Loch that he would rather stay in New York, Loch was firmly against it. Later, Loch threatened to report him to the Board of Health after he found out that Stein had switched doctors. Loch even called the hotel Stein was staying in, and while the proprietress of the hotel was sympathetic to his condition, she asked him not to alarm the other guests and to pay for the bed linen, which Loch had told her would need to be burned after his departure.

A New York Health Department doctor came to visit Stein one day, though he was very sympathetic to Stein's predicament and assured him that they would work something out. Stein's mother did not want him to go to Carville, and did not hesitate to challenge Dr. Loch. However, Loch was not moved.

Tired of the doctor's tirades, Stein went to the Department of Health on his own, and the doctors there advised him to go to the Kingston Avenue Hospital in Brooklyn for therapy and observation. He was escorted there in an ambulance with a police guard and a motorcycle escort. Stein was put in an isolation ward, and stayed in the hospital as 1930 ended and 1931 began.

The doctors at the Kingston Avenue Hospital told Stein not to go to Carville. Dr. Hamlin, a doctor at the hospital, said he didn't see why Stein could not continue treatment in New York. But an orderly at the hospital told Stein to go to Carville before his condition worsened. The orderly warned Stein that he didn't want to end up like the Dutch patient down the hall, whose face looked "like a strawberry pie a horse stepped on".

Stein was finally convinced to go to Carville by William Danner, who was the secretary to the America Mission to Lepers. Danner convinced Stein that he would be cured in five years, and told him the Carville leprosarium was like a country club.

In February of 1931, Stein decided to go to the Carville leprosarium. Stein's case had been reported to the State Board of Health in Albany, and arrangements had to be made to accommodate him to Louisiana, for transmission of leprosy was still a valid fear at the time. Stein requested to take his dog Michael Dugan with him, but was denied.

Stein made his way to Carville, Louisiana by train with the Dutch patient, a Philadelphia physician named Dr. B. Frank Kehler, and a Dr. Victor E. Rambo, a medical missionary on leave from India.