Poverty and Healthcare

Poverty & Healthcare:

The Depression of the 1930s dealt a devastating blow to large numbers of Americans: crushing poverty, hunger, humiliation, and loss of dignity and self-worth. In 1934 an Oklahoma woman wrote a letter to the president stating, “The unemployed have been so long without food-clothes-shoes-medical care-dental care etc-we look pretty bad-so when we ask for a job we don’t get it. And we look and feel a little worse each day-when we ask for food they call us bums-it isn’t our fault…no we are not bums.” Many families abandoned time-honored gender roles like women staying home and taking care of the family and men becoming the single breadwinner. Women began taking jobs known as “traditional women’s work” which was as secretaries, nurses, and waitresses. The pay was also lower then white man’s wages. A white woman working wages earned, on average, 61 percent of a white man’s wages; a black woman earned a mere 23 percent.

Many parents struggled to provide for their families sunder difficult conditions, sometimes risking their health and safety to do so. Erminia Pablita Ruiz Mercer remembered when her father was injured while working in the beet fields in 1933. “Hw didn’t want to live if he couldn’t support his family,” so he risked experimental back surgery and died on the operating table. Young Erminia then dropped out of school to work as “a doughnut girl” to support her mother and sisters. Mexican American families could barely survive on the low wages paid to Mexican America laborers. According to a 1933 study, working children’s earnings constituted more than one-third of their families’ total income. Julia Luna Mount recalled her first day at a Los Angeles cannery: “I didn’t have money for gloves so I peeled chilies all day long by hand. After work, my hands were red and swollen, and I was on fire! On the streetcar going home, I could hardly hold on my hands hurt so much.” Young Julie was lucky her father saw her suffering and did not make her return to the cannery. But Carmen Bernal Escobar’s father could not afford to be soft-hearted about work: “My father was a busboy and to keep the family going….in order to bring in a little more money…my mother, my grandmother, my mother’s brother, my sister and I all worked together” at the cannery. But those with cannery work, hard as it was, were fortunate. Many Mexican Americans were deported. Between 1931 and 1934, more then 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans-approximately one-third of the Mexican populating in the United States-were sent to Mexico, most were children born in the United States.

Towering skyscrapers began to dot the urban landscape, symbolic of the triumph of commerce and corporate power. Science and technology reigned, changing the nature of work as well as the fruits of production. Professional organizations of educators, social workers, physicians, and scientists emerged, while experts with academic credentials became leaders of many public institutions. It seemed as though science could solve virtually anything. Hospitals did not assume their modern form until after the turn of the century when antiseptic methods were well established. Even then, surgery was often performed in private homes until the 1920s. Prior to 1920, the state of medical technology generally meant that very little could be done for many patients, and that most patients were treated in their homes. As the twentieth century progressed, several changes occurred that tended to increase the role that medicine played in people's lives and to shift the focus of treatment of acute illness from homes to hospitals. These changes caused the price of medical care to rise as demand for medical care increased and the cost of supplying medical care rose with increased standards of quality for physicians and hospitals.