DR SARA JOSEPHINE BAKER (DR JO)
After the death of her father, 16-year-old Sara Josephine Baker gave up her scholarship to a liberal arts college and instead applied for medical school.
After graduating in 1898, Baker took a year-long internship at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. After her internship, she returned to New York and joined the New York Health Department as a part-time inspector. In 1907, she was promoted to Assistant Commissioner of Health where she was instrumental in rolling out the smallpox vaccine and tracking down the infamous Mary Mallon, or ‘Typhoid Mary’, a cook who unknowingly passed typhoid from household to household, leading to nine outbreaks.
In 1908, Baker was appointed the Director of Child Hygiene and focused her attention on poverty-stricken areas of the city where overcrowding and disease were rife and the child mortality rate sky high. Baker developed several programmes that used preventive medicine and education. Nurses would visit the homes of mothers and teach them about germs and how they spread; centres were set up to hand out bacteria-free milk and check babies’ health; girls aged between 12 and 16 were taught how to care for their baby siblings while their parents worked.
The results of Baker’s efforts were enormous, saving thousands of lives, and by 1923 New York City had the lowest infant death rate of any major city in the United States and Europe. In fact, the success of her programme was so great that male physicians even attempted to have her department shut down, as they claimed having so many well babies was having a detrimental effect on their own business.
Dr Jo was an open lesbian who lived with her female partner up until her death from cancer in 1945.