Twentieth century Negro literature : $b or, A cyclopedia of thought on the vital topics relating to the American Negro
History
Twentieth century Negro literature : $b or, A cyclopedia of thought on the vital topics relating to the American Negro
African Americans -- History
We must furnish, by all available means and through every possible
channel of information, persistent and systematic instruction in
public, home and personal hygiene. We should utilize especially the
power of the pulpit and influence the public school authorities to
institute, in the colored schools throughout the South, special
instruction on these subjects. The importance of such instruction is
evident in the agitation which is now occurring among the educators in
the schools of the Eastern states. If it is needed there then the need
of it in the colored schools of the South must be urgent indeed.
We must give such education as will tend to a better general
knowledge, especially of the two diseases which, I believe, more than
any, should be the most dreaded as being the most prolific of injury
to mankind and especially to the colored people on account of their
ignorance of the communicability of disease combined with their
poverty. I refer to the contagious maladies tuberculosis and the one
called "specific" or syphilis, the moral as well as the physical blot
on all civilized life. The former is well known nowadays to be one, if
not the worst contagion to which the human family is subjected. In its
various forms it is responsible, probably, for more deaths among the
colored people than any one disease with a definite phenomenon. As
less is known about the latter disease, syphilis, I must mention it a
little more forcibly, however unpleasant and brief the utterance. The
poison of the malady once engrafted into the living body, and
producing its effect there, leaves, according to my professional
experience, and observation, organic evils which are never completely
removed. Various forms of disease of the skin; some forms of
consumption; some phases of struma or scrofula; many forms of
cachectic feebleness and impaired physical build--what are denominated
delicate states of constitution--these and other types of disease are
so directly or indirectly connected with the "specific" taint, it
becomes impossible to be too careful in tracing it out, or in
measuring the degree to which it extends in the field of morbid
phenomenon, in our efforts to improve the vitality of the colored
people and to enlighten them upon this class of diseases.
The widespread encouragement of thrift, industry and efforts among the
colored people to gain a livelihood or, to put it more boldly, to get
money and keep it, thereby obtaining the means with which to supply
themselves with the necessaries of life, and possibly, with some of
its comforts, will materially wipe out a large percentage of that
class of diseases and death that proceed from such causes as worry,
excess of work, physical and mental strain, late hours, broken rest,
etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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