Dr. Sara Josephine Baker

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Dr. Sara Josephine Baker or Josephine Baker, was the first woman to recive a federal government posistion and through her work at the New York Devision of Public Hygiene she saved 82,000 people.

Dr. Sara Josephine Baker 1873- 1945

[edit] Early life

Sara Baker was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1873, to a middle class Unitarian family. When she was sixteen her father and brother died from typhoid. Her family was left with no means of support. Sara decided to become a doctor so she could save people like her father and brother.

[edit] Career

She enrolled in Women's Medical College, founded by Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister Emily Blackwell, and graduated in 1899. In 1901 Sara the civil service exam and qualified to be a medical inspector at the Department of Health. Her job was to lower the death rate in Hell's Kitchen. Hell's Kitchen was considered the worst slum in New York at the turn of the century. It was so bad that 45 hundred people died every week. Sara decided to focus on the infant mortality rate as babies accounted for about 15 hundred deaths every seven days.

"I climbed stair after stair, knocked on door after door, meet drunk after drunk, filthy mother after filthy mother and dying baby after dying baby."

Sara and a group of nurses started to train mothers in how to care for their babies. How to cloth infants to keep them from getting too hot, how to feed them a good diet, how to keep them from suffocating, and how to keep them clean. She set up a milk stand where clean, pasteurized milk was handed out to the indigent families in Hell's Kitchen. Sara also invented a infant formula made out of water, calcium carbonate, lactose, and cow milk. This enabled mothers to go to work so they could support their families. In 1910, to further help working mothers Sara started the Little Mothers League, to train older sisters how to care for their young siblings. She also helped improve the prevention of blindness due togonorrhea-- to prevent blindness babies were given drops of silver nitrate in their eyes, but often the bottles in which the silver nitrate were kept would become unsanitary or too highly concentrated causing blindness anyway. Sara started using small containers made out of beeswax that held enough silver nitrate for one eye. This way the silver nitrate would stay at a safe level and wouldn't get dirty. Through Sara's efforts infants were much safer then they had been the previous year, but there was still one area where it was dangerous. Birthing babies. Babies were all too often delivered by midwives with no guarantee of expertise. Sara convinced New York City to license midwives in order to ensure a degree of quality and expertise.

While Sara was busy campaigning to license midwives, treat blindness, and educate mothers older children were still getting sick and malnourished. So Sara went to work. Each school was given its own doctor and nurse and the children were routinely checked for diseases like lice and trachoma. This system worked so well that diseases that were once rampant in schools become almost obsolete.

Sara was becoming famous, so much so that New York University Medical School asked her to lecture there on children’s health. Sara said she would if he would let her enroll in the school. He had to give in because there was no one else who could give the lecture. So in 1917 Sara graduated with a doctorate in public health. After the United States entered World War I, Sara started to become well known. Most of this publicity was generated from a comment she made to a reporter from the New York Times. She told him that it was safer to be on the front lines then to be born in the United States because the soldiers died at a rate of 4%, whereas babies died at a rate of 12%. She was able to start a lunch program for school children due to the publicity this comment brought.

Sara now had the attention of the world. She was offered a job in London as health director of public schools, a job in France taking care of war refugees, and a job in the United States as Assistant Surgeon General. Sara became the first woman to hold a federal government position when she accepted the position as Assistant Surgeon General of the United States. In 1923 Sara retired, but she didn't stop working.

Sara became the first women to be a professional representative to the League of Nations when she represented the United States in the Health Committee. She also helped to twice catch Typhoid Mary, the first known carrier of typhoid who infected countless people through her job as a cook. Many government positions, departments, and committees were created because of her work including the Federal Children's Bureau and Public Health Services (now the Department of Health and Human Services) and child hygiene departments in every state. She was also active in many groups and societies including over twenty-five medical societies and the New York State Department of Health. Despite all this she also managed to be the President of the American Medical Women's Association and write 250 articles, 4 books, and her autobiography before her death in 1945.