Dr Sara Josephine Baker – Public Health Pioneer (1873-1945)

As part of our blog series about women medical pioneers, meet Dr Sara Josephine Baker. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in public health from the New York University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College and became a Public Health Heroine.

“It is six times safer to be a soldier in the trenches than a baby in the United States.”

Hell’s Kitchen is not just a popular TV show starring a grumpy Gordon Ramsay, it is a district on the West Side of New York City which was once a densely overpopulated slum.

In the early 1900s epidemics of measles, dysentery, typhoid, and diphtheria killed 4,500 people per week, including 1,500 babies, and a third of children died before their 5^th Birthday.

Thanks to the work of Dr Sara Josephine Baker in the specialty of Public Health, the lives of more than 90,000 children in this area were saved. Additionally, New York City’s infant death rate plummeted to the lowest of any large city in America by 1923.

Sara was born in New York to a Quaker family. She studied Medicine at the Women’s Medical College in Manhattan. This was the first Medical School for women in the United States. It was founded and run by Emily Blackwell, sister of Elizabeth Blackwell who was the first woman to become a Doctor in America.

On graduating, Sara decided to pursue a career in Public Health. She was put in charge of the Bureau of Child Hygiene, the first of its kind in America. Sara focused her efforts on education and prevention. She organised rigorous smallpox vaccination campaigns and orchestrated education programs in nutrition and hygiene.

Sara introduced the first “health visitors”, ensuring that all new mums were visited by nurses to teach them about safe infant care, encouraging breastfeeding, regular bathing, and fresh air. She also set up a network of milk stations to provide clean pasteurized milk to mothers who couldn’t breastfeed. The previous alternatives had been beer, dirty water, or contaminated milk.

Dr Baker dramatically reduced the deaths of infants and mothers in childbirth by insisting that midwives were trained and had a license to practice. She also launched a school health program which was adopted in 35 states.

At that time, gonorrhoea was a common cause of infant blindness. It was treated with drops of silver nitrate. Unfortunately, due to imprecise measurements of concentration, contamination and excessive dosing, this treatment often caused more problems than it cured.

Sara designed new containers made of sterile beeswax that contained precise, single doses of silver nitrate. As a result, infant blindness dropped from 300 babies per year to 3 per year.

The news of Dr Sara Josephine Baker’s successes in public health spread, and she was invited to become a lecturer on Children’s Health at the New York University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College (now the New York University School of Medicine). She agreed on one condition: that the school allow women to study Medicine.

Sara wrote prolifically, publishing over 250 articles and 5 books about maternal, infant and child health. Her legacy lives on today in public health programs across the world which continue to save millions of lives.