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| Baker herself, looking businesslike |
Dr Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician, most noted for her work in reducing child mortality rates and improving public health, particularly in New York. She was influential in many different areas, including bringing cases of infant blindness down from 300 babies a year to 3 a year and reducing the death rate in what was considered to be the worst slum in New York.
She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1873. At sixteen, her father and brother both died of typhoid, which prompted her to choose a career in medicine. She studied chemistry and biology at home, and then enrolled in a medical school for women called the New York Infirmary Medical College.
Here she excelled by working tirelessly, and in 1901 she qualified to become a school inspector at the Department of Health. After working successfully in the school system, she was asked to take on Hell’s Kitchen – the poorest area in New York at the time – to help lower the mortality rate. It wasn’t exactly an easy task, with nearly 4,500 people dying in the slum every week. As almost a third of these deaths were infants, she decided to address the failing standards of children’s healthcare in the area.
With a group of nurses, Baker trained mothers on how to better care for their babies – most infant deaths were due to dysentery, with poor hygiene and parental ignorance being the main causes of the illness. She also taught them about feeding their babies a good diet, how to keep them from suffocating in their sleep, how to keep them clean, and how to dress them to keep them from getting too hot. She then went one step further: most commercial milk at the time was contaminated, or mixed with chalk water to make the colour look better and to maximise production, and therefore profit. She set up a milk station where clean milk could be given out to families with infants.
Realising that most members of the family needed to work in order to survive, she invented an infant formula made out of water, calcium carbonate, lactose, and cow milk. This meant that mothers could go to work.
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| An area of Hell's Kitchen in 1890 (S) |
Giving mothers extra ways to support their family and providing safe milk for infants were but two acts on the long list of her impressive career history. Infant blindness was high in the slum (around 300 infants per year), and it was caused by gonorrhoea bacteria transmitted during birth. The cure for this at the time was silver nitrate, which was applied to the eyes. Dr Baker noticed that the bottles where the silver nitrate was kept often became infected with harmful bacteria, or contained doses that were so concentrated that they actually caused blindness, rather than cured it. She then moved the silver nitrate to small containers made from antibiotic beeswax, each of which held one dose of silver nitrate. This meant that the medication would remain clean, and would also stay at a known level of concentration. Thanks to these efforts, cases of infant blindness decreased to just three babies per year.
She then tried to protect children at different stages of their development – during birth and during school. Usually babies were delivered by midwives, who did not need any qualifications or training, and often relied on different folk practices. Baker convinced New York City to licence midwives, to ensure that they were suitably qualified to deliver babies safely. She also worked to make sure every school had its own doctor and nurse, who checked the children regularly for common diseases and parasites which were affecting children, like lice. Diseases that were once commonplace in schools almost disappeared, as this initiative was so effective.
However, these breakthroughs and improvements are not the main reason Sara Josephine Baker was well known. No, she is famous for finding Mary Mallon. Twice.
At the turn of the century, many people were infected with typhoid, including members of Baker’s family. While it wasn’t always fatal, it was possible to die from it, and there was no known cure. However, some people who were infected with typhoid were carriers of the disease – including Mary Mallon, a cook. She was the first healthy carrier, meaning she didn’t display any symptoms. She worked for eight families, and infected members of seven families with the disease. After an intervention by the Department of Health, who sent Baker to arrest Mallon, she was taken into quarantine. In February 1910, Mallon agreed to change her occupation of cook and that she would take suitable hygienic precautions to protect people she came into contact with, and was released from quarantine.
After being released, she disappeared for five years, and was eventually tracked down by Baker at Ney York’s Sloane Hospital for Women, where a serious epidemic of typhoid had broken out. Baker then quarantined her from March 1915, where Mallon remained for the rest of her life. Although this seems extreme, Mallon could have infected hundreds of people. Three people were confirmed dead after being infected by Mallon, and possibly many more died after contracting the disease.
Dr Baker became famous for quarantining Mary Mallon (known as ‘Typhoid Mary’) twice, and protecting many people from being infected with typhoid.
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| Mallon in quarantine (S) |
Alongside being diligent and skilled at her job, and bringing many new changes to the healthcare system that improved many people’s lives, Baker was an intelligent thinker, and exceedingly rational at all times. The New York Medical School asked her to lecture there on children’s health, which was a huge privilege. Instead of jumping at the opportunity, Baker gave them a conditional acceptance – she would go if she could also enrol in the School. Initially the school turned her down, but after searching for a male lecturer who had equal knowledge and failing to find anyone, they accepted. In 1917, she graduated with a doctorate in public health.
Afterwards, she was offered jobs in many different places, including the UK, France, and the US. She officially retired in 1923, but didn’t stop working. She became the first female professional representative to the League of Nations, where she represented the United States in the Health Committee.
Although Sara Josephine Baker wrote very little about her personal life, and it is difficult to confirm whether she was definitely in the QUILTBAG spectrum, she did self-identify as a “woman-oriented woman” and lived most of the later part of her life with Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, an Australian novelist who was open about her sexual orientation. In 1935, the two of them moved to Princeton, New Jersey, with their friend Louise Pearce.
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