Twentieth Century Negro Literature Part 27

The ma.s.ses have always done the drudgery. And that too without knowledge or reference to health keeping. A common practice of employed Negroes is to go or be sent on short quick errands, leaving warm and, in this respect, comfortable places of employment without hat or wrap to breast chilling winds or atmospheric conditions many degrees removed from their places of services. In this practice is the exposure from sudden changes of temperature without preparation. The drayman, the cartman, the man in the ditch and others whose employment is in the open air are exposed not alone by the character of the work in which they are engaged but also by reason of the fact that six days of the week, those in which they labor, of necessity, their clothing is poor and shabby and their persons are ill kept. While the seventh day finds them as a rule well clad and well shod. Then their homes--no, their houses, partly because of circ.u.mstances beyond their control and partly on account of their improvident natures, are little more than shelters or huts.

These houses are built in what is known or accepted as Negro tenant districts, and those acquainted with the localities need no evidence to convince them that they are not sought as either health or pleasure resorts. They are the city alley ways and the low malarial districts where the noxious gases and foul vapors rise from emptying sewers.

More than two hundred years' application has made the Negroes agriculturists; they have been accustomed to labor and to plenty of nature's fresh, invigorating air; they have, because of conditions not proper to treat here, drifted from the farms and fields into the crowded cities, thence into the slums, to be infected with disease.

They have been thrust into prisons where they were provided with the poorest of covering and meanest food for their bodies; where scurvy and other loathsome diseases have made their impress upon them and where incentive to cleanliness is as distant as the North and South poles. Freed from prison life they have gone forth mingling with a cla.s.s of people infecting them with their scales and spreading disease and death.

Then again the race is without proper places to care for its unfortunate, aged and infirm; without orphanages, reformatories and homes for its friendless. Inst.i.tutions which are potent factors in the efforts of a people to prevent neglect and cure criminal tendencies.

All of these conditions are breeders of ills and conductors of death which must be and happily are being abated.

The remedy suggested is a knowledge coupled with an appreciation of health. Both to embrace the science of health preserving and of health getting; better homes and better habits, even to being "temperate in all things."

Acquired, accepted and practiced the mortality of the race will be materially lessened.

THIRD PAPER.

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES OF THE GREAT MORTALITY AMONG THE NEGROES IN THE CITIES OF THE SOUTH, AND HOW IS THAT MORTALITY TO BE LESSENED?

BY DR. JOHN R. FRANCIS.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dr. John R. Francis]

DR. JOHN R. FRANCIS.

Dr. John R. Francis, physician and surgeon, was born in Georgetown, D. C., in 1856. He attended the private and public schools of Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., until his sixteenth year. His academic education was received at Wesleyan Academy, Wilbraham, Ma.s.s. He began the study of medicine under the tutorage of Dr. C. C. c.o.x, at that time dean of the Board of Health, and one of the foremost men in the profession of medicine in the District of Columbia.

His professional course was taken at the University of Michigan, from which he graduated with high honor in the cla.s.s of 1878. Settling in the home of his boyhood, where he was well and favorably known, and where his parents before him were honored and respected, it is no wonder that he succeeded and stands as the leading Colored physician of Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C.

Dr. Francis was appointed in 1894 by the Secretary of the Interior to the position of first a.s.sistant surgeon of the Freedman's Hospital, with a salary of $1,800. He inst.i.tuted several needed reforms in the treatment of patients. He installed the present training school for nurses, and, indeed, was so active in his reformation of affairs in the inst.i.tution that those who know the facts admit that Dr.

Francis, more than any other man, is responsible for the opening of the new era of the Freedman's Hospital, which led to its present flouris.h.i.+ng condition. He is now, and has been for several years past, the obstetrician to the hospital.

He is the sole owner and manager of a private sanitarium on Pennsylvania Avenue, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C. This inst.i.tution has proven to be a panacea to the best element of Colored citizens.

It is a noteworthy fact that Dr. and Mrs. Francis have both served as members of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia.

In the study of the causes and remedy for the great mortality among the colored people of Southern cities I shall not waste time and words in an attempt to prove, by much statistical evidence, that which is already too well known to us as an admitted fact, viz.: a mortality of colored people in cities of the South, very largely in excess of that of the white people of the same communities.

I am fully justified, in the face of our present enlightenment, in entering, at once, into the discussion as to its causes.

If it be true that the animal organism is intended by nature to pa.s.s through a cycle, and that natural death is not a disease, but a completion of the process of life, it follows that the organism, with exceptions, as to any particular cla.s.s of people born in health, is constructed to pa.s.s through this cycle and is not of itself,--that is to say, by its own organism,--capable of giving origin to any of the phenomena to which we apply the term disease. We must, therefore, seek for origins of the phenomena in causes lying outside the body, and affecting it in such manner as to either render the natural actions and processes irregular, or to excite actions and processes that are altogether new.

Writing out in correct lists all the groups of phenomena that make up the term disease, we will find that they invariably come from without.

From my point of view all the groups of diseases are in truth accidents; exposure to some influence or influences that pervert function or create new motion. I must first refer to the cause to which at various times has been ascribed the responsibility for this excessive mortality, viz.: that innate vital weakness exists in the colored population of this country as a result of amalgamation. On this theory the black race when mixed with the Caucasian is the only one which produces with the latter a progeny of weakened innate vitality. I have never seen this statement supported by any trustworthy knowledge or information. On the other hand it has always been accompanied by the most absurd arguments which invariably tend to expose the mind of the writer as being prejudiced to the intermingling and the intermarriage between the two races. It is among the possibilities that physiological peculiarities account for dispositions to disease belonging to typical cla.s.ses of the human family. No one has as yet been able to determine what those peculiarities are. Whether they are primitively impressed on a race, or are acquired is a question that can be answered only when the exact relations.h.i.+ps of diseases to race are discovered. My own view is, that acquired and transmitted qualities and specific existing social peculiarities are sufficient agencies for the production of all the known variations of vitality belonging to peculiar races.

I am now thoroughly convinced that the causes of this great mortality of the colored people of the cities of the South are _poverty_, _prejudice_, and _ignorance_. For obvious reasons I will submit them in the following arrangement:

1. _POVERTY:_

a. Contagious Diseases (close contact).--Diphtheria, scarlet fever, small-pox, tuberculosis, syphilis, etc.

b. Unsanitary Nuisances (11,705 abated in the District of Columbia for year ending June 30, 1900).--Filthy alleys, cellars, bad drainage, garbage, filthy gutters, hog pens, filthy houses, filthy lots, stagnant water, filthy privies, leaky roofs, sewers, filthy yards, filthy streets, wells, etc.

c. Unsanitary Homes.--Only those houses that are refused or abandoned by the white people are offered to the colored people for dwellings.

d. Impure Food.--The large quant.i.ty annually condemned in the District of Columbia is an indication of that to which the poor is subjected.

e. Impure Air.--Bad design and construction (small rooms) and unhealthy location.

f. Impure Water.--Unhealthy sources, cheap, shallow and unhealthy wells, etc.

g. Infantile Mortality.--Unusually large from _poverty_ alone.

2. _PREJUDICE:_

a. Idleness and Crime.--Late hours, broken rest, depraved a.s.sociation, tobacco, alcohol, syphilis, other diseases, etc.

b. A Dest.i.tute Laboring Cla.s.s.--Prejudiced employers, poor pay, excess of work, deficient rest, worry combined with physical exhaustion, unsanitary rooms, etc.

c. Defective Homes.--Small rooms, poor ventilation, either no water supply, or a very bad one, neglect of sanitary measures by both landlord and agent, all the nuisances enumerated above, etc.

3. _IGNORANCE:_

a. Diseases from bad hygiene (public, home, and personal).

b. Induced diseases from physical strain.

c. Diseases from combination of physical and mental strain.

d. Disease from the influence of the pa.s.sions.

e. Disease from sloth and idleness.

f. Disease from late hours and broken rest.

g. Disease from food.

h. Disease from water.

i. Disease from alcohol.

j. Disease from tobacco.

k. Disease from errors of dress.

l. Children of parents diseased or weakened from various causes.

The s.p.a.ce allowed for this article will not permit the discussion of all the causes mentioned above. There are, however, a few that are worthy of our special consideration. For the purpose of condensation, I will attempt the elucidation of the importance of such causes as demand our most serious attention by incorporating them in the following discussion of the most important part of this article: "_How is this great mortality to be lessened?_"