Dr. Sara Josephine Baker

Sara Josephine Baker (November 15, 1873 – February 22, 1945) was an American physician notable for making contributions to public health, especially in the immigrant communities of New York City. She expanded the scope of public health care as the first director of New York's Bureau of Child Hygiene from 1908 to 1923. In 1917 she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in public health from the New York University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College (later the New York University School of Medicine). She also is known for (twice) tracking down Mary Mallon, the infamous index case known as Typhoid Mary.

After studying chemistry and biology at home, 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. The only class she failed—"The Normal Child", taught by Dr. Anne Daniel—led to her fascination with the future recipient of her attention, "that little pest, the normal child". Upon graduating second in her class in 1898, Baker began a year-long internship at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston.

Baker began practicing as a private physician in New York City following her internship. In 1901, Baker passed the civil service exam and qualified to be a medical inspector at the Department of Health. Known as “Dr. Joe,” she wore masculine-tailored suits and joked that colleagues forgot that she was a woman.

Baker was offered an opportunity to help lower the mortality rate in Hell's Kitchen. It was considered the worst slum in New York at the turn of the century, with as many as 4,500 people dying every week. Baker decided to focus on the infant mortality rate in particular, as babies accounted for some 1,500 of the weekly deaths. Most of the infant deaths were caused by dysentery, though parental ignorance and poor hygiene were often indirectly to blame.

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 in their sleep, and how to keep them clean. She set up a milk station where clean milk was given out. Commercial milk at that time was often contaminated, or mixed with chalky water to improve colour and 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.

Baker aided in the prevention of infant blindness, a scourge caused by gonorrhea bacteria transmitted during birth. To prevent blindness, babies were given drops of silver nitrate in their eyes. Before Baker arrived, the bottles in which the silver nitrate was kept would often become unsanitary, or would contain doses that were so highly concentrated that they would do more harm than good. Baker designed and used small containers made out of antibiotic beeswax that each held a single dose of silver nitrate, so the medication would stay at a known level of concentration and could not be contaminated.

Through Josephine Baker's efforts, infants were much safer than they had been the previous year; blindness decreased from 300 babies per year to 3 per year within 2 years.[citation needed] But there was still one area where infancy was dangerous: at birth. Babies were all too often delivered by midwives, who did not necessarily receive any training and who often relied upon various folk practices. Baker convinced New York City to license midwives to ensure some 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 make sure each school had its own doctor and nurse, and that the children were routinely checked for infestations. This system worked so well that head lice and the eye infection trachoma, diseases once rampant in schools, became almost non-existent.

Baker spent much of the later part of her life with Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, a novelist, essayist, and Hollywood scriptwriter from Australia who identified as a "woman-oriented woman." When Baker retired in 1923, she started to run their household while writing her autobiography, Fighting For Life. In 1935 and four years before her autobiography was published, Baker and Wylie decided to move to Princeton, New Jersey, with their friend Louise Pearce.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Josephine_Baker'''

• https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/139844697/sara-josephine-baker