Dr. Sara Baker

Sara Josephine Baker was born in 1873 in Poughkeepsie, New York, to Daniel Mosher  Baker, a lawyer, and Jenny Harwood Brown, one of the first graduates of Vassar College. She was born into a life of privilege. Both of her parents were educated which was unusual for the times. Many men had college educations but it was rare for a women to have one. Women in this time of history were expected to be wives and mothers. The only careers available to the women of these times where teachers or nannies.

Because of poor sanitation there were many people who died from contagious diseases.  Sara’s father and brother died of typhoid fever when she was just sixteen and she gave up a Vassar scholarship to help support her family. The deaths of her father and brother affected her greatly and despite the opposition of family members who were skeptical of women physicians, Sara persuaded her mother that she was making the right decision to become a physician. 
Sara enrolled in the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary in 1894 (founded in 1868 by Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister, Emily Blackwell). Sara knew that this would be a life changing experience and  took full advantage of the opportunity to work with a network of very successful female physicians.

After graduation from medical school, Sara was able to negotiating a year’s internship at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston after graduation in 1898. Part of her internship was to work in the worst slums in Boston. It was here that Sara saw first hand the relationship between poverty and ill health that would occupy her for the rest of her career.

Dr. S. Josephine Baker opened a private practice in New York in 1899, but to help cover  costs took extra work as a medical examiner for the New York Life Insurance Company.  She also worked part-time as a medical inspector for the city — her first foray into public  health and the beginning of her association with city health administration.

Dr. Baker was appointed director of the city’s new Bureau of Child Hygiene from 1908 to 1923.  This was a time when women were not appointed as Public officials and when she was first appointed director, the six physicians who had been her peers as medical inspectors “all resigned because of the disgrace of working for a woman. But she convinced all six to stay. Some resented the fact that a female physician was in charge of a city bureau, and, in 1919, there was considerable pressure to remove her from her position. However, she received great public support from the local press and from mothers who marched to the mayor’s office to protest her possible dismissal. S. Josephine Baker’s innovative programs at the Bureau, the first such agency in the United States, were part of the early twentieth-century focus on social medicine. She devised wardrobe strategies to minimize her femininity — man-tailored suits and shirts, stiff collars and ties to help with her deal with her male colleagues.

 She started working in “Hell’s Kitchen” one of New York’s worst slums. Sara helped to establish some of the first programs in preventative medicine and public health. Focusing on the enormous death rates among infants in the city, Dr. Baker used school nurses in the summer of 1908 to visit the homes of newborns to teach mothers how to take care of their babies. She also invented a baby formula by adding water, calcium carbonate, and lactose to cow’s milk that could easily be mixed up at home, Sara found that babies wrapped in thick clothing were dying from the heat or from smothering. So she designed baby clothing that were light and airy and opened in the front, the patterns were bought by Mc Calls and the Metropolitan Life Insurance company even gave the patterns away free..

Dr. Baker promoted health education in the city’s immigrant communities which was innovative as the prevailing thought was treating disease not prevention, and started a program that distributed pasteurized milk to children. She also started a school lunch program for older children.  Knowing that where ever children were together in large groups like schools they could pass diseases to each other and then to their families she standardized inspections of children for contagious diseases and created a school health program that was copied in thirty-five states across America.  .

 She developed programs for midwife training. She also pioneered city-funded well baby stations, where babies and young children could be seen by doctors and the Little Mothers Leagues (beginning in 1910), to train girls age 12 and older in basic infant care. The Leagues had important practical benefits for the family economy. Educating siblings to care for younger brothers and sisters allowed mothers to go out to work without their children suffering neglect, a key issue for family health and financial security.

Dr. S. Josephine Baker was 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 was the first woman  appointed Assistant Surgeon General of the United States.

By the time Baker retired in 1923, New York City had the lowest infant mortality rate of any major American city. Following her retirement
o She represented the United States on the Committee of the League of Nations and was the first woman representive’s.
o She oversaw the creation of the federal Dept of Health and Human Services
o She helped to establish child hygiene departments in every state of the union.
o She served as president of the American Medical Women’s Association.

Tags: Sisterhood, Women's History

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