This meant mobile clinics. It meant that doctors and nurses accustomed to hospital facilities would have to use whatever they could carry with them. Yet it proved to be a much better system, reaching isolated people who could never have trekked miles to a central clinic, That summer the six-car caravan covered 5,300 miles, administering 2,000 doses of diphtheria toxin and 3,000 doses of smallpox vaccine.
Dr. Dedwylder, a white man, welcomed the Alpha Kappa Alpha group to Bolivar, for he knew they could tell the story of health in a language their own people would understand. He drew up clinic schedules, tacked them up in advance in stores and on fence posts. Word of the mission's arrival went out over the county; plantation owners told their workers and preachers announced it from the pulpit.
Early in the morning the cars packed with medical supplies and health literature arrive at the spot selected for the esy. Many people are waiting. Some have been there since dawn. Most of them have never before had medical attention and are eager for it.
One by one they tell of their pains and "miseries." Youngsters saucer-eyed with fear watch other youngsters submit to vaccination. Expectant mothers are examined and if unusual conditions are discovered word is passed along to one of the county's 130 Negro midwives. Simple dental care is given; badly infected teeth are removed; and each child gets a free tooth-brush and instruction in its use.
Eighty per cent. of the children have diseased tonsils and adenoids. The clinic workers can de nothing about this, because they lack facilities for surgical care, and the county has no hospital for Negroes. The county ce-operates, however, in continuing syphilis and malaria treatments after the clinic's summer session is over—with drugs which the sorority group gives the county health office.
The work this year emphasizes malnutrition, from which many adult Negroes and over half the children suffer as a result of their "three M" diet of meal, meat and molasses. The Southern Negro grows cotton to his doorstep and buys the cheapest food at the plantation commissary: thus the shocking paradox of people starving on some of the earth's richest land, The good these self-sacrificing women have done is now appreciated by alert planters. The group has been invited to other counties and to other states. A fraternal organization in the all-Negro town of Mound Bayou. now health conscious, dropped plans for an office building, using its funds to build a 50-bed hospital. A low-cost health-insurance plan for Negroes is under way. Dr. Thomas Parran, Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service, calls the clinic's achievement one of the greatest jobs of volunteer public health work he has ever seen,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.