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Harlem. To nightlifers, Harlem, the Negro metropolis, is a glittering island of creepjoints, honky-tonks, jive halls. But for its 245,000 inhabitants, jammed into some 230 narrow city blocks, Harlem is a virtual pesthole. The t.b. mortality rate in Harlem is ten times higher than the rate in more prosperous sections of New York City. It is not uncommon for Harlem doctors to be stricken. Confined to a tuberculosis sanatorium at present is brilliant, contentious Skull Surgeon Louis Tompkins Wright, former surgical director of Harlem Hospital, considered by many the outstanding Negro physician in the U. S.
Head of the bustling Central Harlem Health Center is young Dr. John Baldwin West. No chair-warmer, Dr. West often marches into theatres, churches, basements, schools, apartment houses, exhorting Harlemites to visit the Health Center for X-rays, Wassermann tests, infant care. In the last three years, Dr. West and his staff of 200 have X-rayed 250,000 people, have lowered the infant mortality rate from 100 per 1,000 to 52, the maternal mortality rate from 18 to five. Over 500 patients a day visit a venereal disease clinic in the Center. But for all his efforts. Dr. West has scarcely dented the terrific t.b. figure. Medicine has no specific for poverty and overcrowding.
* There are 13 approved Negro hospitals (for internship) in the U. S. Three largest: Homer G. Phillips Hospital, St. Louis; Harlem, Manhattan; Freedmen's, Washington.