Draft Revealed Poor Health of Rural Young Men, Sept. 3, 1919

From The University of North Carolina News-Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., Sept. 3, 1919

Health Work in Carolina

North Carolina ranks ahead of 36 states of the Union in public health work. So reads the report of Dr. Charles V. Chap in 1914 to the American Medical Association. This high rank is the cumulative result of the faithful, effective work of Drs. Thomas P. Wood, Richard H. Lewis and W.S. Rankin, who in order named have been the secretaries of the State Board of Health from 1877 to date.

Nevertheless 15.68 percent of our drafted men were rejected by the local examining board as physically unfit for service in the World War. Twenty-nine states made a better showing. Of the men we sent to the camps, 8.74 percent were rejected for physical unfitness and 32 states made a better showing. These are the figures of Provost Marshal General Crowder. All told, around a third of the North Carolinians called into service—men in the prime of life—were pronounced unfit to fight. Two Southern states, Kentucky and Arkansas, eight Central Western states and two Rocky Mountain states ranked ahead of us.

--The War With Germany, Colonel Leonard P. Ayres, Army Branch of War Statistics

The Task in Carolina

All of which means that there is a vast deal of work still to be done in the field of public health in North Carolina. Every one of our 500,000 homes, white and black, must be reached with the gospel of preventable disease and postponable death. The Public Health Bulletin of the State Health Board—and it is one of the best half dozen publications of this sort in the United States—goes into 50,000 homes. Its circulation ought to be increased tenfold. Supporting public intelligence in the vital matters of personal and public hygiene, sanitation and sanitary engineering must be created in every county. We have public health departments and laboratories in nine counties—more than in any other Southern state; but we must have them in 100 counties. We must have public health nurses in adequate numbers in both our town and country regions. We have a hundred or so organized under Dr. L.B. McBrayer, Superintendent of our State Sanatorium, but we must have more, many times more. Our hospital facilities must be immensely increased. Six thousand beds in 80 private, semi-public and public hospitals for 2,500,000 people in North Carolina is tragic. There are fewer than 300 beds in four private negro hospitals for 830,000 negroes. The treatment of tuberculosis is necessarily a local problem. We have at present only one county TB hospital—in Forsyth. We must have one in every county, or one for each co-operating county group. Public health physicians and public health nurses must be trained, or we shall limp along lamely for many years to come and we must get ready for such training on a large scale in North Carolina. Every institution of technical and liberal learning in the state needs to ally itself in proper ways with our State Board of Health, and to reinforce at every point the magnificent work it is doing.

Rural Sanitation

Farmers who are concerned about comforts, conveniences and health conditions in country homes will do well to write Professor Saville about domestic systems of lighting, running water for kitchen, bathrooms, inside toilet seats, sewage disposal and the like.

The selective draft revealed the amazing fact that the country is not, as we had long thought, the safest place in the world to rear children in. The health and physical vigor of city-born boys was shown to be far better than that of boys born and reared in the country.

Our North Carolina country people need to give far greater attention than heretofore to health conditions in the countryside. The University is offering itself freely to city and country homes alike, and it will like to be used in behalf of better health conditions everywhere in the state.

Public education and public health are two after-the-war tasks of foundational importance in North Carolina.

In the appendix to the new University Extension bulletin on Sanitation in the South will be found a brief list of choice pamphlets concerning country health, country home conveniences and comforts, running water and sewage disposal in country homes, and so on. They can be had free of charge by sending a postcard request to the addresses indicated.