(New York’s Lower East Side was said to be the most densel...)
New York’s Lower East Side was said to be the most densely populated square mile on earth in the 1890s. Health inspectors called the neighborhood “the suicide ward.” Diarrhea epidemics raged each summer, killing thousands of children. Sweatshop babies with smallpox and typhus dozed in garment heaps destined for fashionable shops. Desperate mothers paced the streets to soothe their feverish children and white mourning cloths hung from every building. A third of the children living there died before their fifth birthday. By 1911, the child death rate had fallen sharply and The New York Times hailed the city as the healthiest on earth. In this witty and highly personal autobiography, public health crusader Dr. S. Josephine Baker explains how this transformation was achieved. By the time she retired in 1923, Baker was famous worldwide for saving the lives of 90,000 children. The programs she developed, many still in use today, have saved the lives of millions more. She fought for women’s suffrage, toured Russia in the 1930s, and captured “Typhoid” Mary Mallon, twice. She was also an astute observer of her times, and Fighting for Life is one of the most honest, compassionate memoirs of American medicine ever written.
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(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1923 edition. Excerpt: ...up the bony structure of the body, and owing to the rapid growth of infants and children, mineral salts are more important in their diet than they are in adult life. Water forms about eighty-seven per cent of the composition of milk. It is essential as a solvent for the other constituents of milk, such as the protein, carbohydrates and salts, and to hold the fats in suspension to form an emulsion. Water is necessary to replace the great waste of bodily tissue that is going on constantly, and the fluids that are lost through the bowels, kidneys and skin. In proportion to its weight, an infant requires six times as much water as an adult does. Comparison of Human Milk and Cows' Milk The following table shows a comparison of human milk and cows' milk. Human Milk Cows' Milk Average Per Cent Average Per Cent Fats 3.50 4.00 Sugar (carbohydrate) 7.50 4.75 Protein 1.25 3.50 Salts 20.75 Water 87.55 87.00 Total 100.00 100.00 "Holt The main difference between human milk and cows' milk lies in the greater amount of sugar in human milk, and the excess of protein in cows' milk. In the analysis given above, milk with 3.5 per cent fat has been given as an average, as milk of this fat content gives the best results in infant feeding. While the sugar in cows' milk is less than in human milk, it is of the same kind. The protein, occurring in larger amount, also forms a tougher curd, and is less easy of digestion than the protein of human milk. These facts all must be taken into account when deciding how cows' milk is to be modified for infant feeding. Cows' Milk Jersey, Alderney or Guernsey cows usually give milk which has a very high fat content, therefore its use is apt to cause digestive disturbance. The milk from Holstein or Ayrshire cows is more...
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physician public health administrator
Sara Josephine Baker was born on November 15, 1873, in Poughkeepsie, New York, the third daughter and third of four children of Orlando Daniel Mosher Baker, a prosperous attorney of Quaker ancestry, and Jenny Harwood (Brown) Baker, of colonial New England descent.
She received her early education at local private schools and, to please her father, who had hoped for a son, became proficient in sports and games. When she was about ten she suffered a knee injury and for the next two years walked on crutches. She prepared to enter Vassar College, where her mother had been one of the first students, but was forced to give up the plan in 1890 when her father's death left the family in financial straits. Realizing that she must find a way to support her mother and surviving sister, she decided to use the family's small remaining capital to study medicine, perhaps because of her admiration for the physicians who had cared for her at the time of her accident. The opposition she encountered as a woman only strengthened her resolve, and in 1894, after a year spent in mastering the prerequisite scientific background, she entered the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, then under the direction of Dr. Emily Blackwell.
After graduating in 1898, Dr. Baker served a year's internship in the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston and then returned to New York City to begin general practice. Her income during the first year, derived almost entirely from obstetrical cases in a poor West Side neighborhood, was only $185. To supplement it, she persuaded a life insurance company to make her a medical examiner for female applicants for policies who wished a woman doctor. In 1901, after passing a civil service examination, she secured an appointment as a medical inspector in the city health department and spent five hours a week finding and reporting cases of contagious disease among schoolchildren. She soon discovered that the inspection system was a political structure with little relevance for disease control and planned to resign, but when in 1902 a reform administration took over the city government and reorganized the health department, she accepted a summer job visiting tenements in the Hell's Kitchen district to locate and care for babies with diarrheal diseases. In an epidemic of dysentery that summer some 1, 500 infants were dying in the city each week, and Dr. Baker gained an intimate knowledge of the medical problems resulting from poverty and ignorance.
In the next few years, during which she was made an assistant to the commissioner of health, she carried out a variety of assignments and gradually evolved the idea that motivated the rest of her life: that the control of childhood disease should be a problem of prevention rather than cure. In the summer of 1908 she was allowed to test her plan for reducing infant mortality. Working in the congested slums of the Lower East Side with a staff of thirty nurses, she obtained each day from the registrar of records the name of every newborn child in the district. One of the nurses promptly visited the mother and taught her what to do to keep the baby well--breast feeding, efficient ventilation, frequent bathing, thin summer clothing, out-of-door airing wherever possible. These methods, commonplace today, were at that time completely new to the poor as well as to public health officials. When the demonstration program had been completed, the record showed 1, 200 fewer deaths for that district than in the previous summer. Her success led to the creation that August of a Division (later Bureau) of Child Hygiene within the New York City Health Department, with Josephine Baker as its chief - the first official agency set up by any modern government to deal with the medical problems of infancy and childhood. By 1918, the infant death rate in the city had fallen from 144 to 88 per 1, 000 live births.
Under Dr. Baker's leadership the Division of Child Hygiene implemented other programs designed to give babies a healthy start in life. The licensing system for midwives, who flourished among the immigrant populations, was put under strict control and the standards raised. In 1911 a free six-month training course for midwives was established at the city's Bellevue Hospital, and new applicants for licenses were required to present a certificate from this or similar schools in Europe. New legislation required midwives to use silver nitrate drops in the eyes of all infants they delivered, to prevent blindness. To reduce the mortality rate in foundling institutions, which was much higher than in even the poorest homes, Dr. Baker stressed the value of the foster mother system, being one of the first to recognize the dangers of maternal deprivation. Recognizing that the "little mother, " the small girl in a poor family who must take care of the next youngest child while their mother worked, was a vital factor in infant health, she organized Little Mothers' Leagues among schoolgirls; they were given practical instruction in child care and served as missionaries of the new health gospel in the tenements and slums. Later, in 1917, she gave additional impetus to the school lunch movement, estimating that 21 percent of the children in the New York public schools were undernourished. Working toward the same goal, child health, she organized the first Federation of Children's Agencies in New York City.
Dr. Baker was consulted by numerous governmental agencies that wished to set up units for child hygiene. She took an active part in the work of the federal Children's Bureau from the time it was established in 1912 until her death, serving for sixteen years as a consultant on its staff. She was one of the founders of the Association for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality (1909, later the American Child Health Association) and was its president in 1917-18. She had promised herself to retire when all the states in the country had organized a bureau of child hygiene, and when this occurred, in 1923, she kept her word. Infant mortality in New York City had then dropped to 66 per 1, 000.
Dr. Baker spent her last years at Trevenna Farm, her home in Bellemead, New Jersey; at the time of her death she was a member of the New Jersey State Board of Health and of the board of directors of the New Jersey State Reformatory for Women at Clinton. She died of cancer at New York Hospital, New York City, at the age of seventy-one and was buried in the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery.
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
(New York’s Lower East Side was said to be the most densel...)
(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
In religion she was a Unitarian.
She was known for the warmth of her personality and her strong sense of humor.
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. "
