We know that the draining of a marsh pond banishes malaria; a change from the city to the country reinvigorates, and that those who live in the high, well drained portions of our cities have the smallest degree of mortality and that the greater comforts possessed by the affluent secure for them longer life than the poor who are not so favored. To diminish the mortality in the Southern cities will depend upon both the individual and social efforts as well as upon the public measures of the legally constituted authorities.
The dirty neglected portions of our city where refuse and rubbish, animal and vegetable matters are deposited and allowed to rest and send up their poisonous odors from house to house, must be looked after. The dwellings of our people must be improved. The old, dilapidated stables, in the narrow, filthy alleys; the low, damp basements and dark cellars, often below the ground, with an insufficiency of both light and air; the clusters of homes built in the bottom and low places, closely pent up, back to back so as to prevent ventilation with only one entrance to each, and a privy between; the over-crowded conditions of these uninhabitable quarters and the quality of the food taken by those who live in these disgraceful dwellings must be looked after.
Habits of living must be corrected and a crusade against ignorance and vice begun by society. I don't think I would miss it very far when I say that one-third of the colored people in our cities live in just such dwellings as I have described here; while most of the white population live in well-built houses in the healthy portions of the cities. Is there any surprise that there should be so great a disproportion in the mortality of the races? Compare the statistics of all the large cities and you will find that under similar conditions, this same proportion in mortality exists in the Northern and foreign cities, where the food and dwelling of the poor have the same difference. But this same difference exists nowhere in the world as it does in the South. It is almost impossible for a colored man to rent a respectable house anywhere in the cities; but the dark, low, damp, confined, ill-ventilated cellars and alley houses are rented for as much as comfortable quarters ought to bring. I don't wonder that the mortality of the Negro is so great; but I do wonder that it is not greater. Any other race of people would have been exterminated in twenty years.
The remedy for the high death-rate is the enactment, and enforcement of laws against allowing the people to sleep in basements, cellars, old stables, alley houses, in low malarial sections of the cities, and making the penalty against the landlords so great, that they will not rent such places for dwellings. Regulate the kind of tenement houses and the number of persons who shall sleep in one room, the kind of food and rules for its preparation; break up these late church meetings in poorly ventilated houses, and the problem will be solved.
The infant mortality will be reduced one-half when our people learn that the care of a good conscientious physician is necessary, from generation to development, and through the entire stage of adolescence; not so much to cure, as to prevent disease. Our whole system of medicine is now turning upon prevention rather than cure. When the public is educated up to the point of paying physicians to prevent as well as cure diseases, then, there will be less sickness and fewer epidemics.
Then sanitary science, under the strict observance of hygiene, will reach perfection; the rude, gross habits of living will be corrected; a system of perfect drainage and ventilation will be inaugurated; pure air and fresh water supply will be furnished to every public and private house; only pure, unadulterated foods will be on the markets; every hotel, private and boarding-house will furnish properly prepared diets, and universal cleanliness will be the law.
Last, but by no means least, I call your attention to another most potent remedy for the diminishing of the great mortality of the race in the South. Besides the city hospitals, the whites have many other hospitals and infirmaries, supported by church and benevolent organizations where those that pay are at the hospitals because they can receive the constant attention of a physician and nurse. We need and should have such hospitals. The benevolently disposed people, the churches and societies of the cities could establish and well support them. In them, there would be pay wards and charitable wards. Each church and society supporting the hospitals could send their indigent sick to the charity wards and those who can pay, to the private apartments.
These hospitals would afford a much needed opportunity for young women of the race to prepare for trained nurses and afford better facilities for the physicians to practice surgery and study remedies.
We have established in the city of Nashville, the Mercy Hospital under the care and management of the Board of Trustees, composed of some of the best citizens and heads of our great universities. Among the directors are, Hon. J. C. Napier, President; W. T. Hightower, Treasurer; Dr. G. W. Hubbard, Dean of Meherry Medical College; Dr. P. B. Guernsey, President of Roger Williams University; Prof. H. H. Wright, Fisk University, and Dr. R. H. Boyd, President of the National Baptist Publishing Board.
The hospital is located at 811 S. Sherry street, Nashville, Tenn., in one of the most quiet, beautiful and healthful localities of the city. The site is high and well drained; the building large and commodious and up-to-date in all its apartments. There are two large wards; one for male and one for female, and private rooms, to which good pay patients are assigned where they will come in contact with no one but their physician and the nurse.