Everything about Sara Josephine Baker totally explained
Sara Josephine Baker (
1873 –
1945) was an American physician notable for contributions to public health in New York City. She is best known for her statement that a person was more likely to die by being born in the United States than as a soldier in World War I.
Career
She enrolled in the
New York Infirmary Medical College, a medical school for women, founded by the sisters and physicians
Elizabeth Blackwell and
Emily Blackwell. She graduated in 1899. In 1901 Josephine Baker passed the
civil service exam and qualified to be a medical inspector at the Department of Health, working as a
school inspector. Upon working in these schools, she was offered the opportunity to lower the death rate in
Hell's Kitchen. Hell's Kitchen was considered the worst slum in New York at the turn of the century with as many as 4500 people dying every week. Baker decided to focus on the
infant mortality rate, as babies accounted for about 1500 deaths every seven days.
"I climbed stair after stair, knocked on door after door, met drunk after drunk, filthy mother after filthy mother and dying baby after dying baby."1
Baker and a group of nurses started to train mothers in how to care for their babies. How to clothe infants to keep them from getting too hot, how to feed them a good diet, how to keep them from suffocating, and how to keep them clean. She set up a
milk station where clean,
pasteurized milk was handed out to the indigent families in Hell's Kitchen. (Pasteurized milk was a new innovation. Commercial milk at that time was often contaminated, or mixed with water and chalk to maximize profit.) Baker also invented an infant formula made out of water, calcium carbonate, lactose, and cow milk. This enabled mothers to go to work so they could support their families. In 1910, to further help working mothers, Baker started the '
Little Mothers League' to train older sisters to care for their young siblings. She also aided in the prevention of
blindness due to
gonorrhea: To prevent blindness, babies were given drops of silver nitrate in their eyes, but often the bottles in which the silver nitrate were kept would become unsanitary or too highly concentrated, causing blindness anyway. Baker started using small containers made out of beeswax that held enough silver nitrate for one eye. This way the silver nitrate would stay at a safe level and wouldn't get dirty. Through Josephine Baker's efforts, infants were much safer then they'd been the previous year (blindness decreased from 300 babies/year to 3/year within 2 years). But there was still one area where infancy was dangerous: at birth. Babies were all too often delivered by
midwives with no guarantee of expertise. Baker convinced New York City to license midwives in order to ensure a degree of quality and expertise.
While Baker was campaigning to license midwives, treat blindness, encourage breastfeeding, provide safe pasteurized milk, and educate mothers; older children were still getting sick and malnourished. Baker worked to change this, too. Each school was given its own doctor and nurse, and the children were routinely checked for diseases like
lice and
trachoma. This system worked so well that diseases once rampant in schools become almost obsolete.
Early in her career, she'd helped to twice catch
Mary Mallon, also known as
Typhoid Mary. Mary Mallon was the first known healthy carrier of
typhoid who infected countless people through her job as a cook. Mallon wasn't the only repeat offender in being a typhus-contagious cook, but she was the only one put in isolation for the rest of her life. It may have been relevant that the other offenders were male, or that they were not of
Irish heritage.
Josephine Baker was becoming famous, so much so that
New York University Medical School asked her to lecture there on children’s health, or 'child hygiene', as it was known at the time. Baker said she'd if she could also enrol in the School. The School had to give in because there was no one else who could give the lectures. So in 1917 Baker graduated with a doctorate in
public health. After the United States entered
World War I, Baker became even better known. Most of this publicity was generated from her comment to a
New York Times reporter. She told him that it was safer to be on the front lines than to be born in the United States because the soldiers died at a rate of 4%, whereas babies died at a rate of 12%. She was able to start a lunch program for school children due to the publicity this comment brought. Over the years of her career, she made intelligent use of the press to advance the goals she'd for public health. She made use of the publicity around the high rate of young men being declared
4F (not eligible for draft due to poor health) as a motivating factor for support in her work on improving the health of children.
Josephine Baker was now known across the world. She was offered a job in
London as health director of public schools, a job in
France taking care of war refugees, and a job in the United States as
Assistant Surgeon General. In 1923 she retired, but she didn't stop working.
Josephine Baker became the first woman to be a professional representative to the
League of Nations when she represented the United States in the Health Committee. Many government positions, departments, and committees were created because of her work including the
Federal Children's Bureau and
Public Health Services (now the
Department of Health and Human Services) and child hygiene departments in every state. She was also active in many groups and societies including over twenty-five medical societies and the
New York State Department of Health. She also became the President of the
American Medical Women's Association and wrote 250 articles (both professional and for the popular press), 4 books, and her autobiography before her death in 1945.
Personal life
Josephine Baker wrote very little about her personal life, however her partner for much of the later part of her life was
Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, a novelist and essayist from
England (External Link
), and self-identified as a 'woman-oriented woman'. I.A.R. Wylie is best known for the novel "The Daughter of Brahma", and "Life with George", an autobiography. When Baker retired in 1923, she started to run their household while writing her autobiography. In 1935, Baker and Wylie decided to move to Princeton, NJ, together with their friend
Louise Pearce, M.D.. Pearce was a biological researcher at the
Rockefeller Institute, working on animal models for
trypanosoma (
African sleeping sickness) and
syphilis, and the testing of treatments. Pearce later became the President of the
Women's Medical College of Philadelphia. While Baker and Pearce left little documentation of their personal lives, Wylie was open about her orientation. But she didn't identify either Baker or Pearce in her writings. Wylie's papers, including some personal letters, were donated to the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia (now the
Medical College of Philadelphia), where they're available in the college's archives.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sara Josephine Baker'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://sara_josephine_baker.totallyexplained.com">Sara Josephine Baker Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
