Of 12,000,000 Negroes in the U. S., one-third swarm in industrial cities, two-thirds huddle on tired Southern soil. Proportionately they have three times as much tuberculosis and syphilis as whites, a maternal and infant mortality rate more than 60% higher. At birth a Negro baby can look forward to a probable life of only 47 years, compared to a white baby's 59. Herewith TIME tells the story of four attacks on this No. 1 public health problem.
Chief financiers of Negro health programs are the U. S. Public Health Service and the Rosenwald Fund for Negroes, established in 1917 by Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald of Chicago. Since 1928, the Fund has given $1,250,000 to build Negro hospitals,* train doctors and nurses, help out the two Negro medical schools—Howard in Washington, Meharry in Nashville.
In the war to liberate Negroes from syphilis and t.b., the generals have always been white doctors, but local battles are now fought by Negroes. Barred from all but a few Northern hospitals and medical schools, pioneering Negro doctors from Harlem to New Orleans have set up a score of model clinics and health stations.
Frederick Douglass. Greatest killer of both Negroes and whites is heart disease. But while tuberculosis has dropped to seventh place among whites, it still holds second among Negroes, killing over 15,000 every year. Like syphilis, the "white plague" is a white man's disease, was unknown in Africa. Some authorities hold that the Negro is more susceptible to tuberculosis than the white man because he has been exposed to the tubercle bacillus for only three or four generations, has not yet developed the white man's age-old resistance. But latest research shows that prime cause of the high Negro t.b. rate is poor living conditions.
Few Negro doctors know much about tuberculosis, few white doctors dare to operate on their "massively" infected Negro patients. Outstanding Negro thoracic surgeon in the U. S. is young, gentle Frederick Douglass Stubbs of Philadelphia. Son of a well-known doctor, graduate of Dartmouth, a leader of his class in Harvard Medical School, Dr. Stubbs spends most of his time at dingy Frederick Douglass Hospital. Here he looks after a ward of some 25 patients with advanced tuberculosis, whose lungs he deflates and drains of pus.
Frederick Douglass welcomes all types of cases, gets along somehow on a State grant of $4,500 a year, dollar contributions from poor patients and friends. Patients live on frankfurters and beans, nurses go for months without pay. Its hundred general beds, says Dr. Stubbs frankly, could easily be absorbed by other Philadelphia hospitals. But he fights to keep 45-year-old Frederick Douglass alive, for it is the only hospital in the U. S. where Negro doctors can undertake thoracoplasty (rib surgery for collapsing the lung). Dr. Stubbs chooses his patients carefully, for they are all test cases. Since 1937, when he started thoracoplasty at Frederick Douglass, Dr. Stubbs has operated on 40 patients, almost all of them "poor risks" (some even over 60), has lost only five.