12	REPORT  WITH  RECOMMENDATIONS  OF
II. HEALTH, HOUSING AND SANITATION
These subjects are very closely allied <and are of universal interest and of common importance to all regardless of race.
The Negroes of the State show an alarmingly high death rate in certain localities. There are several causes for this: heavy and hazardous employment; unsanitary houses. and surroundings; over-crowding, caused by high rent; inadequate hospital accommodations and the high cost of hospital treatment and nursing. Sometimes the patient has an unreasonable fear of hospitals, causing refusal of ^lospital treatment until it is too late. This Commission recommends the increase of hospital facilities both in the City of Baltimore and other parts of the State. The loss of the State in labor alone through preventive disease is altogether too great.
There is no preventorium for colored children who may be exposed to a tubercular environment. Much can be done to save the children and families where tuberculosis exists if there were a proper preventorium to segregate the children for a time. There are at present practically no maternity wards for colored women. Efforts now being made toward securing hospital facilities for the City and State should have every encouragement.
Adequate sanitary housing is so closely tied up with industrial opportunity and wages as to be practically determined by these factors. As a general rule people will live in as good homes as they can afford to buy or rent. Where the demand for a very large number of very cheap houses exists, the tendency is to poorer and poorer accommodations and relatively larger and larger profits to the owner. The largest possible use should be made of Negro physicians and nurses and racial co-operation through them with health and sanitary boards by actual membership where possible on such boards, and at all events the creation of advisory bodies of interested colored workers.
RECOMMENDATION No. 3
That plans proposed for providing increased hospital accommodations for the colored people of the State be favorably considered.