The way to keep people from dying from disease, it struck me suddenly, was to keep them from falling ill. Healthy people don’t die. It sounds like a completely witless remark, but at that time it was a startling idea.
— Sara Josephine Baker
Masks, sanitizer, hand towels.
Words we now hear on a regular basis. All items that have become so customary in our lives that not a day goes by where we don’t leave our house without them.
It’s common knowledge to all of us that these precautionary and hygienic measures are directly related to the transmission and infection of diseases. However, this wasn’t always the case. Diseases have shadowed humanity throughout history. Typhoid, Smallpox, the Spanish Flu. Covid. All diseases which have haunted humanity’s past and still do today. A continuous war.
And it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that a strategy was developed to stop this endless battle. The realization of the direct link of sanitation to disease. A realization by a woman who not only modelled the public health system of over thirty-five states in the USA , but also fought for women’s rights, tackled problems like poverty and neglect in her community and saved the lives of an estimated 90,000 children throughout her life.
Sarah Josephine Baker’s work continues to save the lives of millions to this day.
Or, Dr. Joe, as most of her colleagues called her. Often seen in a tailored blazer, smart tie and a bold short-cut hairstyle, Sarah Josephine Baker designed a public health system that ended this never-ending war and transformed the course of history as we know it.
Born in 1873 to a wealthy Quaker Family in New York, Baker was a bright and enthusiastic child, with relatively little worries. However unfortunately for Baker, no family could escape the swarm of diseases brewing in the city. At the age sixteen, both her father and brother died from typhoid, leaving Baker, her mother, and her siblings to fend for themselves.
Gripped with grief and anger, she decided to join the armed forces of nurses and doctors, all training to face the demon of disease that gripped country. Graduating from New York Infirmary Medical College in 1898, she was ready to enter the heart of this war and fight against the beast that has directed the course of history for too long.
Bakers first entered the battlefield by completing an internship at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, where she was struck by how devastated some areas were due to poverty, hunger and disease. Witnessing this, she began her first attack. After becoming the Medical Inspector for the Department of Health in New York, she first focused on an area known as ‘Hell’s Kitchen’. With over 4,500 deaths every week, of which 1,500 were children, it was one of the most dangerous places in the city of New York. Poverty stricken gangs roamed the streets while diseases such as dysentery, typhoid and gonorrhoea became acquainted with each household.
And there was no time to lose. Baker first began by training mothers in the area on how to properly care for their children. Setting up health stations, she taught women and young mothers how to care for, clean and feed a child as well as controlling an infant’s temperature and preventing suffocation in their sleep. She provided each woman with a recipe for infant formulas to prevent malnourishment and presented simple yet efficient methods of prevention for many diseases.
Her work didn’t stop there. Now in the heart of the battlefield, her second attack focused on schools, ensuring every public school had access to doctors, nurses and a means of providing children with nutritious meals. Refusing to retreat from the battlefield, she then focused on childbirth and teaching midwives how to safely deliver children as well as providing qualifications to these women throughout the city.
Disease began to withdraw from the battlefield and by 1911, infant mortality dropped by over forty percent. By 1923, Baker’s work and efforts drastically cut the mortality rate of New York, going from the highest to the lowest in both the US and Europe at that time. Her attack was so successful that thirty five states modelled their public system based on her methods of tackling this war and the end of the never-ending was beginning to appear.
There’s no doubt that Baker’s work was revolutionary. Not only did she fight diseases and death that gripped her country for generations, but she also fought against the patriarchal society that failed to recognize equality for women. After being asked to give a series of seminars at New York Medical School, Baker refused to attend unless she could enroll and obtain a degree. After first rejecting Baker, a decision made by the committee purely based on her sex, they were eventually forced to resign to Baker’s requirements, recognizing that only she had the knowledge and capability of giving the lectures they required. This eventually led Baker to become the first woman to receive a doctorate in public health.
With the help of her partner, Australian novelist Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, she wrote a total of four books, including an autobiography, in which she tells us of the struggles and challenges she and her colleagues faced throughout their careers as physicians.
Working in countless societies in New York and continuing her work in public hygiene in her later life, Baker sadly died of cancer in 1945. And like an echo, her legacy slowly began to become quieter and quieter, even though her work still influences society today.
I often wonder how many children she saved. How many women she prepared for their future roles as mothers. How much pain she prevented. And regardless of all this amazing work, she remains unrecognized, unknown, forgotten. And only we can stop this. Only we can prevent the name of Sarah Josephine Baker being forgotten. Only we can stop this endless cycle of dismissing women and their work throughout their lives. And to do this, let’s start with celebrating the hardworking and dedicated women that surround us today.
References
Baker, S. J. (1939). Fighting for life. New York: The Macmillan company
Epstein, Helen (September 26, 2013). “The doctor who made a revolution”. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved September 13, 2013.
“Sara Josephine Baker.” Notable Scientists: From 1900 to the Present. Online. Gale Group, 2008.
“Sara Josephine Baker Facts”. Encyclopedia of World Biography. Gale Group. 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2016.
Baker, S Josephine (April 2006). “Dr Joe: pioneer of public health initiatives for immigrant mothers and children. 1925”. American Journal of Public Health. United States. 96 (4): 618–21. doi:10.2105/AJPH.96.4.618. ISSN 0090–0036. PMC 1470557. PMID 16551961.
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