Medicine: Meningitis in Mobile

An 18-year-old welder was taken to City Hospital in Mobile last fortnight. Doctors said she had meningococcus meningitis. Promptly the ambulance driver was told to take the patient back where she came from—City Hospital, like all Mobile’s six hospitals, did not take contagious cases. When the head of the sick girl’s rooming house refused to let her in, the driver shouted: “She lives here and she’s dying. She has no other place to go. I’m going to put her in here if I have to call the police to do it.” Next day the girl died.

Mobile, one of the towns worst hit by the doctor shortage (and a wartime population jump from 114,906 to 230,000), was right poky about hospital space for contagious cases until last week. Then the meningitis zoom which Mobile shares with the rest of the U.S. forced action.* With 23 cases in February, and new ones developing at the rate of eight a week, the city health department persuaded the Sisters of Charity (who run City Hospital on contract) to open up the hospital’s empty wing to contagious cases.

Deaths from meningitis in Mobile have been estimated at 25%. (Army & Navy rate: about 3%.) Mobile doctors blame lack of hospital care at least in part for their city’s whopping death rate.

*There were 2,845 cases of meningitis in the first five weeks of 1944, compared with 1,612 in the same period last year and a five-year median of only 275.