Medical Issues In The Progressive Era

“The 1910 Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching… further heightened expectations for substantial improvements in the quality of medical care and in the general health of the population” ( Winkelstein, Jr., 2009, p. 44). Issues such as major medical care problems and public safety existed in US cities after industrialization. The emerging progressive era would work to correct sanitation and medical system issues which lead to the US improving conditions. Most of the U.S. population would not acknowledge that there were any problems and these institutions would try to exclude certain people from having access to any health programs. In the Progressive era issues in the healthcare and sanitation systems were improved

Even though the United States government was already making improvements to the healthcare system, they excluded African Americans from all the progress that they made. Most believed that African Americans brought it upon themselves and that they inherited their sicknesses, and diseases. “Richmond's city officials were also aware that the high death rate of the city's African Americans, usually about twice that of whites, inflated the average for the city as a whole and negatively affected the health of all of Richm ” (Hoffman, 2001, p.177). Officials in Richmond Virginia first started to notice at how bad their death rates were when other states started to comment on it. African Americans made up the majority population in Richmond and even when they brought attention to problems they were excluded from the solutions, and the government was mostly worried about how the state looked overall. Eventually the government did have to step in and help them some. “Only in those programs administered by the Health Department's nurses did Richmond's African Americans receive anything like an equitable share ofthe benefits ofthe city's conversion to modern public health policies and practices, and even practices, and even there, the results were limited ” (Hoffman, 2001, p 188). Africans Americans were helped eventually but at a very limited amount compared to

A extremely notable muckraker was Upton Sinclair and his book The Jungle which helped persuade the United States president to take action against the unsanitary conditions that were making people sick and injured. There were laws in place at the time, that an inspector had to check certain meats such as pork to make sure they did not have tuberculosis, but as Sinclair said while talking about the inspector “He was quite willing to enter conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular por; and while he was talikng with you you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched ” (Sinclair, 1906, l. 616). This shows that the laws that were in place were not regularly enforced, and by this one inspector not doing his job hundreds of people could have gotten sick. Also, it goes to show that if one person was not doing their job correctly then there were probably more that were not either. Not only were laws not enforced but the safety and health standards were horrible. “ The floor was half an inch deep with blood, in site of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling ot through holes; it must have made the floor slippery…” (Sinclair, 1906, l. 653). Sanitation was really lacking because you never know