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S. Josephine Baker (1873
- 1945)
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Champion
for Children's Health: A Story about Dr. S. Josephine Baker
by Greg Ptacek, Lydia M. Anderson (Illustrator) A
biography of the doctor who, along with other achievements, was
among the first to act on the idea that preventative medicine and
health care for children is a function of government. Gr.
3-5. With large type and several full-page black-and-white
drawings, this is a simple biography of the doctor who pioneered
public health care standards for children at the turn of the
century. A dramatic opening incident describes how, as a
privileged child, Baker once gave away all her party clothes,
including her underwear, to a poor girl her own age. After that
chapter, however, there's almost no sense of her personal life or
individual complexity. The author focuses on Baker's public career
and connects her work in children's health with her fight for
women's rights. What emerges most vividly is a strong sense of the
social conditions of the time: the city slums filled with new
immigrants; the crowded, unsanitary conditions that caused
infectious diseases to spread like wildfire. It's against this
background that Ptacek sets Baker's work, both the daily drudgery
with individual patients and the vision that established
preventative health care as a necessity. -- Hazel Rochman
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Baker, S. Josephine (Sara Josephine
"Jo" Baker) (1873-1945)
Raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, Baker became a
medical doctor in 1898. She studied with Dr. Emily Blackwell and
Blackwell's companion and colleague Dr. Elizabeth Cushier, at the
Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and
Children. Upon the completion of an internship in Boston, Baker
started a pediatrics practice in New York City while working as a
medical inspector.
In her autobiography Fighting for Life
Baker writes of the obstacles faced by women doctors in the early
20th century and the poor health conditions she found in New York
City slums. In 1908 she established the municipal Division of
Child Hygiene, the first agency of its kind in the world. Her work
and the programs it inspired are credited with saving the lives of
about 82,000 children between 1908 and 1923.
In addition to teaching, writing and serving on
state and federal commissions, Baker represented the United States
on children's health issues at the League of Nations.
In the 1930s she and her lover I.A.R. Wylie moved
to Princeton, New Jersey where they were later joined by Dr.
Louise Pearce. Later the three moved to a farm in Belle Mead, New
Jersey.
Related Resources:
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From gaygate.com
Excerpt:
Dr. S. Josephine Baker (1873-1945) Sara
Josephine Baker was born on November 15, 1873 in Poughkeepsie, New
York. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother had been in the
first graduating class of Vassar College. When Baker was sixteen,
her father died of typhoid which he had contracted from
Poughkeepsie's drinking water. Discovering that the family
finances were ruinous, Baker's mother nevertheless managed to pull
together enough money to send her daughter to school, and in 1898
Baker received her MD from the Women's Medical College of the New
York Infirmary for Women and Children. After a year's internship
at the New England Hospital in Boston, she returned to New York to
enter the practice of medicine, augmenting her meager income by
working as a medical inspector for the New York City Health
Department. Assigned to Hell's Kitchen and the midtown slums, she
later wrote: "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." Alarmed by the high
infant mortality rate in the city, in 1908 she established the
Division of Child Hygiene, the first public agency in the world to
address issues of children's health and a model for similar
programs throughout the United States. At first male doctors
refused to work with her, but eventually she won them over.
Emphasizing the importance of preventative medicine, Dr. Baker
introduced public school health programs, infant health clinics,
and special schools designed to train midwives. In the first five
years of the Child Hygiene Project, the infant mortality rate in
New York City dropped from 144 per one thousand births to 105 per
thousand births. By 1923...
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