Atlanta Daily World

Things You Ought To Know
CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED

After every speech an old gentleman of the Roman Senate invariably concluded with the remark: "Carthage est delendum."

"and also I think Carthage must be destroyed". Carthage as you may remember was a rival city whose trade and commerce jeopardized that of Rome. So it was decreed that it must be destroyed.

Thomas Parran in his book "Shadow on the Land" makes this poetic review"

Perspective sometimes makes thing meaningful and sometimes flattens them into mediocrity. It all depends upon the angle of vision.

As one looks at arrange of hills from a roadside creeping along the slopes below them they assume a dignity and contour quite unlike a view of the same hills from an airplane 5000 feet up, when they seem the vaguest undulations".

'Historically, it is fatally easy to glorify the past: to survey events with a reverent, upward look, What men have muddled through in times before us takes on the sanctity of perfectly planned achievement. Compromises seen courageous, defeats mere strategic retirements."

"In science, the temptation is to glorify tomorrow. Hardbitten though he may be, realist though he must be, the scientist by the nature of his calling looks eternally ahead. Always on the outposts of knowledge, he must continue to explore, survey, define, correct, if he is to extend the boundaries of human achievement".

Social diseases such as syphilis and tuberculosis which kill and maim so many people must finally be conquered plagues. But a great deal will depend not upon science or medicine but upon the development of careful personal habits among the lowliest citizen.

In the case of the Negro sick our doctors and nurses must be able to handle the types of cases which become affected.

A Negro physician or nurse can understand a Negro patient better because they both have the same racial outlook. A noted psychiatrist told a group of people a few days ago, that mental disease which among white people constituted a radical departure from the normal behaviour in the Negro was an every day normal event.

Voluntary health organizations have been of inestimable value in supplementing official public health work. It is estimated that the real reason the tuberculosis death rate has receded so rapidly during the past twenty years is because the National Tuberculosis Association by its teamwork of doctors and citizens collected information about tuberculosis and published it and brought pressure to bear upon communities to provide facilities for treating and finding cases.

However now that practically all of the patients, certainly among the Negro group have been weaned away from the private physicians these clinics should change their basis of operations and pay the physicians for their work in maintaining the clinic. The Negro doctors have no wealthy outside clientele to offset the loss accrued by clinic charity patients nor do they have public hospital facilities to compensate in other more lucrative fields of medical endeavor.

What I mean by the term Carthage must be destroyed, is that the present selfish attitude of those who control the field of medical practices must become liberalized towards the least of the fold in order to keep the wolf of socialized medicine away from the present fat medical incomes of a few.