Only a few weeks ago I had a pathetic illustration of this situation on my own farm. A baby in one of the white families had been sick, and as my wife and I talked with the mother one Sunday we realized that the child would certainly die unless given prompt and efficient treatment. Carrying the mother and child to a baby specialist at once, he declared that hospital care was absolutely necessary; only the treatment that could be given in a properly equipped hospital would save the child’s life.
“If you lived in the city here,” the mother was told, “your children could be treated in the charity ward, even though you were unable to pay the hospital expenses, but there is no such provision for sick children of country mothers.”
All over the country today, the same sort of situation exists. In nearly every city, provision has been made whereby a poor man or woman, boy or girl, when desperately sick, can get needed hospital treatment, even though unable to pay; but for sick men, women and children in our country districts no such facilities exist. Hence thousands suffer and die unnecessarily, as this child might very quickly have done but for the help given parents with the hospital bill.
One of the greatest needs of the South, in our opinion, is the general adoption of the county hospital idea—hospitals that do not shut and bar their doors to every pitiful case of suffering beyond the town lines, but are open to country and city patients on equal terms, letting those financially able pay their expenses, but providing for adequate treatment at public expense of all the needy poor, no matter whether they come from town or country. It would mean some increase in the tax rate, of course, but it would mean a far greater advance in civilization, in human happiness, and in practical Christianity.
--By Clarence Poe in the Progressive Farmer, as reprinted on page 3 of the Smithfield Herald, Oct. 28, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073982/1924-10-28/ed-1/seq-3/
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