Named event or history
County nurses, clinics, the health department, and sanitation work from the 1920s: public health’s reach into the countryside.
2 indexed records are connected with this event.
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Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 19, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 19 in the chronology →
The health department of the Chapel Hill Community Club engaged a Black nurse, known as Nurse Compton and formerly of Lincoln Hospital, who began on January 1, 1924, visiting homes, examining children at the Black schools and organizing clean-up campaigns. By May 1926 the town had taken over part of her salary and she worked under Health Officer Nathan.
The Community Club's seal sale committee reported that seal money had sent an Orange County man to a sanatorium and paid $450 toward the nurse working among Black residents, who inoculated 68 people for typhoid and brought 36 patients to a free tuberculosis clinic.
From 1927 a yearly football game played by Black teams on Fetzer Field, sponsored by the University YMCA, raised money for the public health nurse serving Chapel Hill's Black community, a project run by the Community Club. The 1941 game involved the Orange County Training School and raised $275 net.
In a letter to the Chapel Hill Weekly, county welfare superintendent George H. Lawrence wrote that Orange County had no county health officer, no county health department and no public health nurse, and that little preventive health work was being done. He contrasted Orange with Vance County, which had a health officer, a hospital and a tuberculosis sanatorium.
After several new typhoid cases were reported in late June 1932, about 600 people received typhoid vaccine at the Chapel Hill public clinic in a single day, and the Infirmary gave the treatment on any day. Town health authorities said the water supply was not the source.
The Parent Teachers' Association arranged a free clinic at the school building to examine all children due to enter school that fall, with physicians from Duke Hospital and Chapel Hill dentists, and urged vaccination against smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid.
Dr. Charles S. Mangum described a proposed public health district of Orange, Person and Caswell counties, largely paid for by the U.S. Public Health Service. It would also train health officers, sanitary inspectors, public health nurses and secretaries, building on UNC's 1934 to 1935 public health administration courses.
Because typhoid fever had appeared in the county, a temporary health organization, set up as part of the planned district unit, began operating in Orange County on July 1, 1935. Its staff were acting health officer Dr. G. A. Sumner (lent by the State Board of Health), acting health nurse Marie Strickland, secretary Ida Lloyd and sanitary inspector E. B. Caruthers.
A district health department for Orange and Person counties was organized in summer 1935 as a model unit linked to UNC's public health teaching. Dr. Malcolm Henderson Rourk was appointed district health officer, with sanitary inspector E. B. Caruthers and a public health nurse and clerk in each county. The district officer also took over Chapel Hill's municipal health authority.
Acting district health officer Dr. William P. Richardson appointed Grace Beatty, who held a master's degree in public health nursing from Columbia, as supervising nurse under an enlarged program funded by Social Security money. By July 1936 the Orange-Person staff of 11 included staff nurses Agnes Tolbert in Chapel Hill and Ruth O'Briant and Lieotta Hall in Roxboro.
People: William P. Richardson
A month-long field training course for 29 new public health workers (14 nurses, 6 sanitary officers, 4 sanitary engineers and 5 health officers), described as the first in North Carolina, ended in Chapel Hill in early July 1936 under Dr. William P. Richardson. The Orange-Person and Durham health departments then ran as a joint field training center, and by July 1937 it had trained 109 workers.
People: William P. Richardson
District health officer Dr. William P. Richardson announced that Chatham County had joined the Orange-Person Health District, which would provide a physician, a nurse and a sanitary officer for the new county. The State Board of Health had kept a nurse in Chatham for the past year with U.S. Children's Bureau funds.
People: William P. Richardson
At a meeting of county commissioners in Chapel Hill, State Board of Health executive officer Dr. Carl V. Reynolds offered the Chatham-Orange-Person district $5,900 from the Smith Reynolds Foundation fund for venereal disease control, if the district matched it. The program called for examinations and clinics to bring every infected person in the district under treatment.
The School of Public Health's first research project, a field epidemiological study of syphilis funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, ran from 1940 to 1950 with the state venereal disease control program in Orange, Chatham, Person and Durham counties. Project staff held clinics, lectured and traced contacts in the health departments.
A News of Orange County piece described the county public health nurses' duties: school inspections, immunization against diphtheria and smallpox, well-baby clinics twice a month, a monthly maternity clinic, tuberculosis and venereal disease clinics, orthopedic referrals, and the wartime maternity and infant care program for servicemen's wives.
The Orange-Chatham-Person Health Department's X-ray unit operated at the Chapel Hill health department from March 13 to 20, 1946, offering free chest X-rays for tuberculosis to any Orange County resident. Health officer Dr. O. David Garvin urged residents to use it.
People: O. David Garvin
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