North Carolina Has Fewest Hospital Beds of All States, July 7, 1920

From the University of North Carolina News Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., July 7, 1920

Our Hospital Facilities

These are flush times in Carolina. Already we have an average of $50 apiece invested in motor cars--counting men, women and children of both races, and we are buying automobiles faster than any other state in the Union--some $140,000 worth a day, including Sundays!

But in hospital facilities we stand at the bottom of the column. Even South Carolina stands three places ahead of us! A recent survey by the editors of the American Hospital discloses 143 hoswpitals in North Carolina with only 1,777 beds, for two and a half million people.

And this count includes hospital of every sort, private, public, semi-private and institutional.
As for free public hospitals, there are only a bare half dozen in the entire state, counting the State Tuberculosis Sanitarium, two county hospitals and three municipal hospitals--three of these on a tax foundation and three established and maintained for the most part by noble private philanthropy.
Not a free public hospital in the state for negroes, and only four private hospital with fewer than 250 beds for oiur colored people! Only one hospital bed anywhere for every 3,000 negroes in North Carolina.

Is it not time for Carolina to consider the establishment of at least 10 regional clinics and dispensaries? And county group hospitals as in other states of the Union?

How else can we care for our 25,000 cases of open, pronounced tuberculosis? How on earth can these stricken sufferers be cared for in a state institution with fewer than 300 beds?

Disease prevention and health promotion is essentially a local responsibility, and our cities and counties must assume it. And with our abounding health, we will be heartless beyond words if we cannot hurry to this task.

Forsyth and New Hanover are nobly leading the way.

Wake is struggling forward against odds strange to say. With 700 cases of tuberculosis in Wake--or enough to fill the state sanitarium twice over in this county alone--how can Wake hesitate?

How can any other county in the state hesitate in this matter of hospital facilities, abundant, and freely open to the public?

We are today sending away into another state a well-nigh friendless boy, to be examined and treated for bronchial tuberculosis. And in this one little villege there are seven other piteous cases of this dread disease.

And no place in North Carolina for them! Or so only after perilous delay!

Have a heart, Carolina, have a heart!

Surely with all our wealth our hearts are not fat, our ears heavy, and our eyes shut, as were those of Israel in Isaiah's day!

If so, Israel's curse may well be laid upon Carolina.