The public health nurses worked in the clinics at the health department. They had what they called child health stations, and that’s where the mothers in the community would bring their babies, and their young children, preschool children, for medical supervision. The doctors would examine the children and immunize them. The nurses would conference with the mother regarding any kinds of problems that might come out of that. If there were any need for the children to be referred for medical care, then the referrals were made and the nurse would conference the mother as to where to go, what to do, and give her a referral form. Some of the children might be ill and they would tell the mother to take the child to the hospital or the doctor. The nurse would also follow up on that, give a time element, check the chart, check with the mother to see if the referral had been made; in other words they followed it through to some resolution. Also, the nurse would go into the homes if necessary, if the mothers didn’t come into the clinics or keep their appointments, the nurse would go out and try to ascertain why, and what the problem was, and what could be done with it. Any necessary referrals that the nurse needed to make, the nurse would also make those. If there were a family problem, and economic problem, the nurse would hook the family up with social services to help solve that, or any other family problems: mental problems, or even abuse, but there was very little of that in those days that we had to do.

Now that’s just the child health station, then they had the chest clinic, and this is all of course the city [New York City] too, it wasn’t just Harlem. The Harlem health center was called the Harlem Health Center, and that was located in the same complex as Harlem Hospital. The chest clinic was where people could come to get chest x-rays. Basically, they were concerned with tuberculosis. If a person came in and the x-ray was positive, then it was up to the nurse to follow through with the family, go into the homes and try and find out who was the source case, which person was spreading this illness. And follow through to see that that source case was medically treated, usually hospitalized, just follow through on the whole family for medications or whatever else was needed. It was a biggie because this was before the tuberculosis drugs came out, and it was a high mortality/morbidity illness in the area.