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He was born on September 8, 1864 in Bethel, Connecticut, the first of four children, all sons, of Elijah Clark Baldwin, a Congregational minister, and Frances Marsh (Hutchinson) Baldwin, daughter of a physician. Both parents were of old New England stock, with strict standards of discipline. Although the family's income was modest, the children received a sound education.
Baldwin attended the Hillhouse High School in New Haven, intending to enter Yale, but at the age of sixteen left school to work in the magazine and hardware business in order to contribute to the financial resources of the family. In 1887 he entered the Yale Medical School, where he served as a laboratory assistant and received the M. D. degree in 1890.
He received honorary degrees from Yale (1914) and Dartmouth (1937).
After an internship in the Hartford (Connecticut) Hospital (1891 - 1892), Baldwin opened a general practice in Cromwell, Connecticut. Within a few months, however, he began to suspect that he had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and confirmed the diagnosis by examining his sputum under the microscope and identifying tubercle bacilli. In the winter of 1892, hoping to regain his health, he went to the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium, later the Trudeau Sanatorium, near Saranac Lake, N. Y. , where the physician-in-charge, Edward L. Trudeau, had a growing reputation in the outdoor and hygienic treatment of tuberculosis. Only a decade had elapsed since Robert Koch had announced his discovery of the tubercle bacillus, and many physicians still refused to accept its role in producing the disease. Trudeau, impressed with Baldwin's scientific abilities, accepted him as a patient and put him on a regimen of combined rest and cautious, part-time scientific investigation in the sanatorium laboratory - the first to be established in the United States for experimental research in tuberculosis. Baldwin assisted in the clinical duties, but gave his chief attention to the problems of native and acquired resistance to tuberculosis, making animal experiments with various kinds of tuberculin. He was able to spend part of the years 1901 and 1902 studying under Koch and other leaders of German medical research.
By 1908, when the Sixth International Congress on Tuberculosis, then dominated by Europeans, met in Washington, D. C. , Baldwin had become recognized as a leader in the field and shared the platform with outstanding scientists such as Koch and Albert Leon Charles Calmette of France, known for his part in developing a vaccine against tuberculosis. In his paper "The Problem of Immunity in Tuberculosis, " Baldwin displayed extraordinary familiarity with the literature in the field and reported his own significant experiments on inherent and acquired resistance, emphasizing the role played by mild infection or even inoculation with dead tubercle bacilli in stimulating strong resistance to more serious infection. In succeeding years Baldwin developed this theme extensively. And, just as Trudeau had stimulated him, he in turn strongly influenced a younger researcher, Allen K. Krause, who clarified the relations of allergy, or hypersensitivity, and infection. The concepts of these three men on the mechanism of resistance to tuberculosis dominated American thought for a quarter of a century.
Baldwin epitomized his views in a widely circulated text, Tuberculosis: Bacteriology, Pathology and Laboratory Diagnosis (1927), written with two laboratory associates, S. A. Petroff and L. U. Gardner. This monograph strongly emphasized the role of hypersensitivity in heightening inflammatory reactivity to tubercle bacilli and stressed its implementation by "an acquired specific digestive power" of sensitized and thereby immunized phagocytic cells, a concept in which Baldwin was influenced by the maturing views of his own student Krause. Most of the research on which these views were based was carried out in the Saranac Laboratory, which Baldwin directed until 1926. During these years Saranac Lake had become world-renowned in the study of tuberculosis. Baldwin, as dean of the laboratory group, and Lawrason Brown as leader of the clinical group, together with Krause and others resident or trained at Saranac Lake, carried out a program of practical and advanced teaching in what was designated the Trudeau School of Tuberculosis. In association with Walter B. James in 1915, Baldwin inaugurated and initially directed the Edward Livingston Trudeau Foundation, which gave strong support to tuberculosis research.
Baldwin published more than a hundred papers on tuberculosis, several of which were of encyclopedic character and appeared in leading medical texts. He was editor-in-chief (1916 - 1921) of the newly founded American Review of Tuberculosis. Active in the national and international control of tuberculosis, Baldwin served as president of the American Clinical and Climatological Association (1910) and the National Tuberculosis Association (1916 - 1917). After World War I he was a delegate at a conference sponsored by the League of Red Cross Societies at Cannes, France, which set the stage for renewed cooperation among nations in tuberculosis control.
Baldwin is remembered as a physician and laboratory investigator with rigorous professional standards. He was awarded the Trudeau Medal of the National Tuberculosis Association in 1927 and the Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians in 1936, and received honorary degrees from Yale (1914) and Dartmouth (1937).
He was also a leader in the civic activities of Saranac Lake and in its Presbyterian church.
Uncomplicated in personality, he was cautious and thoughtful in reaching decisions, but firm in his convictions when they were made.
Baldwin had married Mary Caroline Ives of Cheshire, Connecticut, on June 1, 1895. They had one child, Henry, who became prominent in the field of forestry.
