[DOWNLOAD] "Individual and Organizational Responses to Health Conditions in Harlem, New York, During the Interwar Period." by Afro-Americans in New York Life and History " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Individual and Organizational Responses to Health Conditions in Harlem, New York, During the Interwar Period.
- Author : Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 239 KB
Description
Between 1919 and 1940, Harlem's social activists, health workers, physicians, and politicians mounted a political action and public advocacy campaign to improve health care resources in the community. Protest as a political strategy was only one method utilized by Harlem's black population to improve institutional conditions, physical health, and well-being and thereby develop community. Simultaneously, Harlem's black residents forged alliances among themselves and with white philanthropists to formulate organizational responses, create voluntary arenas for social engagement, and sustain services aimed at improving the health and well being of Harlem residents. (2) This voluntary sector, far from being unified, was internally divided. The participating agencies constituted a social field of competing ideologies, needs, and interests, and the amount of resources available to those seeking to improve wellness--their own and Harlem's--had little support from governmental sources. Black and white health and social welfare activists, medical practitioners and statisticians debated the causal factors in mortality rates among native blacks and immigrant groups. (3) Godias Drolet, purported that the decreased incidence of tuberculosis in whites was the result of increased immunity due to prolonged exposure to "tuberculization" and urbanization. (4) Similarly, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that African Americans' high death rate from tuberculosis was the result of blacks' lack of immunity because of their "relatively short period of contact with the disease." (5) While not disavowing racial differences, Clark Tibbits, Chairman of the National Health Inventory Operating Council of the United States Public Health Service, maintained that more emphasis should be placed on environmental conditions in "determining Negro health status." (6) Montague Cobb, a physician and NAACP health activist, echoed Tibbits' ideas, arguing that African Americans' health problems were the "reflection of their socio-economic circumstances." (7)