(3 of 4)
Flint-Goodridge. Eight years ago, the only place for sick Negroes in New Orleans was the halls of ancient Charity Hospital, where patients slept two and three in a bed. And there was not a hospital a Negro doctor could practice in. In 1931 the Rosenwald Fund, the Congregational and Methodist Episcopal Churches started a fund to build a hospital for New Orleans' 130,000 Negroes. Cotton Merchant Edgar Bloom Stern, son-in-law of Julius Rosenwald, boomed up a campaign for more money. In a town where only two charity campaigns had reached their quota in 15 years, Mr. Stern got $200,000 from white citizens, $50,000 from Negroes.
With $500,000 Mr. Stern and a group of white and black doctors built Flint-Goodridge Hospital, a solid, severe, sun-flooded plant, with 100 beds, complete X-ray and clinical facilities for 30,000 patients a year. As superintendent they chose a Negro real-estate agent and insurance salesman, bland, 35-year-old Albert W. Dent. When Mr. Dent moved his family and furniture into a second-floor ward, Flint-Goodridge had neither patients nor staff. Most Negroes thought a hospital a place to come and die in. Of the 35 Negro doctors in New Orleans, only about 20 were graduates of approved medical schools.
To Mr. Dent's aid came the late, great Gynecologist Charles Jeff Miller, who gathered a staff of white experts from his own Tulane, and from Louisiana State University Medical Center. The white doctors took charge of the hospital's various departments, worked in the clinics with the Negro doctors, who had no rank. When the colored doctors were trained, they were moved up into the white doctors' places. Flint-Goodridge, says Mr. Dent, has fewer staff squabbles than many all-white hospitals in New Orleans.
To get patients to come, Mr. Dent organized venereal disease lectures in factories and clubhouses, started mothers' clubs, ran lawn parties, sent nurses into poor homes. To compete with the grannies, who delivered 20% of all Negro mothers, he offered confinement and hospital care for $10, lowest fee charged by midwives. Result: fewer colored women than white now use midwives in New Orleans, a situation probably unique in the U. S.
Flint-Goodridge also boasts the cheapest, most complete hospital insurance plan in the U. S. Cost: one cent a day. Most similar schemes, covering three weeks' hospitalization, charge at least three cents a day. If he can convince his doctors, Mr. Dent will soon start a two-cent-a-day plan to provide complete medical care as well.
So smoothly going a concern is Flint-Goodridge that other hospitals in the North have borrowed Mr. Dent to supervise reorganization plans. Highest praise of all comes from white doctors in New Orleans, who point to Flint-Goodridge as the "cleanest," most effective small hospital in town.