(2 of 4)
Macon County. "In Macon County, Ala.," said Surgeon General Thomas Parran two years ago, "even [in 1929] . . . the poverty was worse than anything I had seen in long years of work in the rural South. The houses were tumbledown shacks, many without floors, with no furniture, and only a few rags for bedding. The windows were without glass. When it grew cold, boards were nailed across the opening and the family huddled together in the gloom. In this environment we found the saturation point of syphilis. In about 39.8% of all age groups of the colored population, the blood test was positive."
But ten years later, in 1939, Dr. Parran could point with pride to a medical miracle: only 10% of the 23,000 Negroes in Macon County had syphilis. In. three years, experts predict, the disease will be wiped out. To root syphilis out of Macon County, the U. S. Public Health Service, the Rosenwald Fund and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute all joined forces. Leader of the campaign is a white man, the county health officer, a former Georgia farm boy who drove a flivver through fields of mud, 36 miles a day to medical school. Last month, deep-eyed, sunburned Dr. Murray Smith began his tenth year in Macon County. "There's not much in this job," said he, "but the love and thanks of the people."
At first the Negroes used to gather in the gloomy courthouse in Tuskegee, while Dr. Smith in the judge's chambers gave them tests and treatment. Later he set up weekly clinics in old churches or schoolhouses, deep in the parched cotton fields. Last fall the U. S. Public Health Service gave him a streamlined clinic truck. The truck, which has a laboratory with sink and sterilizer, a treatment nook with table and couch, is manned by two young Negro doctors and two nurses. Five days a week it rumbles over the red loam roads. At every crossroads it stops.
At the toot of its horn, through the fields come men on muleback, women carrying infants, eager to be first, proud to have a blood test. Some young boys even sneak in to get a second or third test, and many come around to the truck long after they have been cured. One woman who had had six miscarriages got her syphilis cured by Dr. Smith with neoarsphenamine. Proudly she named her first plump baby Neo.
With syphilis now under control, Dr. Smith is trying to haul down Macon's high maternal mortality rate. To drive the old pipe-smoking "grannies" out of the midwife business, Dr. Smith last year put trained-nurse midwives into competition with them. Three Tuskegee-trained nurses live in lonely outposts, far from the red-mud roads. Every day they trudge through the backwoods, examining prospective mothers, if all is safe & sound, delivering babies on kitchen tables. Last year, said Dr. Smith, the grannies' business dropped from 700 to 500 babies; this year it will be far lower.