It’s a New Year, and I’m wishing friends and family the usual – a happy and healthy new year. I truly hope that. We have had more than enough public health disasters in the past few years. I am also thankful that we live in a society with a public health system in place when such disasters arise. Here in Bossier we have one man in particular to thank, Dr. Herbert N. Barnett, Director of the Bossier Parish Health Unit from 1937-1969.
Dr. Herbert Barnett was born in 1881 in Enterprise, Tennessee, and moved to Texas in 1899 with his family when he was 18. He graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School and went into private practice in south Texas, traveling by a horse and buggy until he bought a brand-new 1912 model motorcar. With the onset of World War I, he served as a medical doctor in France with the American Expeditionary Forces, then returned to Texas and private practice until he decided to serve with the Texas State Public Health Service in 1925.
The Bossier Parish Police Jury opened a public health unit (with parish, state, school board, and federal funding) in February of 1937, temporarily on the lower floor of the Masonic Hall in the parish seat of Benton. The unit, under the direction of Dr. Murphy Simms and a very small staff, got to work right away, working long hours to inoculate school children in Benton, Rocky Mount, and Plain Dealing against small pox with the goal to get all parish students immunized. The next plan was providing all Bossier school children with physical exams, starting with first and third graders, and administering the diphtheria toxoid vaccine. Dr. Simms left within 6 months, however, to pursue private practice in Waskom, TX.
By this time Dr. Barnett was working for the Louisiana State Health Department in their central office, and they wasted no time sending him up to Bossier from New Orleans for a temporary assignment until a replacement for Dr. Simms could be found. After just a few weeks on the job, and enjoying the work, Dr. Barnett asked if he could have the permanent job. He stayed on for over three more decades, to implement and see many changes in medicine and public health and in Bossier Parish itself.
When Dr. Barnett started as Bossier Parish’s public health doctor, the parish was still in the middle of the Depression and the rural parish had few paved roads. The health unit was in a three-room house in Benton. Most women gave birth at home and the health unit supervised the many women who worked throughout the parish as midwives. One room school houses still existed, although were being phased out, and Bossier City’s population was only about 5,000. Diseases such as typhoid fever, diphtheria, and malaria were significant health problems.
Dr. Barnett combatted malaria, which hardly spared a single Bossier family, in the early 1940s with a mosquito control program that sprayed house to house across the parish. The typhoid fever problem was dealt with in a multipronged approach. One was mass immunizations, with as many as 600 to 1000 given in a day. The other approach was sanitation. The little one and two-room school houses did not have sanitary facilities, save for “the woods.” Supplying sanitary facilities and improving the water supply allowed the parish to beat typhoid.
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Dr. Barnett gave much credit in this effort to beat typhoid in the parish to the assistance from the WPA, which was the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era employment program that met public needs while providing employment to groups of young men. The WPA had a mass-building project of pit toilets throughout the parish. Dr. Barnett mentioned in a 1969 interview that he still saw businessmen and other professionals around the parish whom he first met when they were young men, grateful to be employed at $3/day, building toilets. In fact, Dr. Barnett said, he credits much of the health unit’s success with both the cooperation of officials and the people of the parish. “We could not have done what we’ve done without the cooperation of the people,” he stated.
Dr. Barnett reminisced to the “Shreveport Times” in June 1967, when the Parish had announced Dr. Herbert N. Barnett Day for the 23rd of the month. A tea was held for the occasion by Parish Home Demonstration Agent Lettie Van Landingham. Dr. Barnett marveled that since he had started practicing medicine in 1907, “Miracle drugs have been developed, also inoculations of typhoid, diphtheria, and polio. Ignorance on the part of the general public was a great handicap. People feared immunization more than they did the likelihood of getting the disease.”
Dr. Barnett retired as director of the Bossier health unit in August of 1969, just after his eighty-eighth birthday. Dr. Barnett had also continued to serve as an Army reserve lieutenant colonel well into his eighties. When asked how he managed all he did at such an advanced age, he would quip, “I have always gone to a good doctor.” He lived until the age of 93, passing away on June 5, 1975 at his home in Bossier City. He was survived by a daughter, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was a member of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
The Bossier Parish Libraries History Center can provide an abundance of interesting facts and photographs about the people and institutions of Bossier Parish. We would also love to hear your stories and see your photos about Bossier Parish community life. With your permission we could scan them to add to our collection. Visit us soon at 2206 Beckett Street, Bossier City. We are now open: M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. For more information, and for other intriguing facts, photos, and videos of Bossier Parish history, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok.
Images:
Color portrait of Herbert Nowlin Barnett, M.D. Portrait hung in the Bossier Parish Health Unit, which Dr. Barnett directed from 1937-1969
Public health poster for a sanitary (pit) privy
Article by: Pam Carlisle
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