LGBTQIA+ History Month 2023: Sara Josephine Baker (1873 – 1945)
To celebrate LGBTQIA+ History Month 2023, we are showcasing profiles for some of the incredible microbiologists and virologists from history who were part of the LGBTQIA+ community. It is important for this community to claim their past, celebrate their present and create their future.
Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician who made significant contributions to public health and child welfare, particularly in immigrant communities in New York. She decided on a career in medicine at the age of 16, after her father and brother died of typhoid and graduated in 1898 from the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary. In 1901, she was appointed as a medical inspector in New York City.
Early in her career, Baker helped lower the infant mortality rate in Hell’s Kitchen, one of the most poverty-strike areas of NYC with an estimated 4500 deaths per week, 1500 of these being babies. Baker taught women how to correctly clothe their babies, how to stop them suffocating in their sleep and the importance of a good diet and clean milk. She set up clean milk stations, supplying a safe, clean formula she invented. This allowed women to go to work to help support their families. Furthermore, Baker helped dramatically reduce infant blindness, which was caused by gonorrhoea
bacteria transmitted during birth. Containers for the silver nitrate eye drops used to treat the bacteria often became contaminated or unsanitary, so Baker devised a new antibacterial container made from beeswax which each contained a single dose, thereby preventing contamination. These eye drops were later made compulsory for all infants in New York City.
In 1908, the Bureau of Child Hygiene was established, and Baker was appointed director. She implemented many innovative policies which had massive impacts on child health and mortality rates including strict examination and licensing of midwives (which was not a requirement previously); appointment of doctors and nurses in schools to help prevent the spreading of disease and infestations amongst older children; and public health education campaigns distributing information among parents on keeping good hygiene and caring for babies. The school health program she pioneered was copied in 35 states across America.
Baker also helped identify the infamous ‘Typhoid Mary’, or Mary Mallon, a cook who the first known asymptomatic carrier of the pathogenic bacteria Salmonella typhi. She instigated several separate outbreaks of the disease, infecting between 50 – 120 people. Baker was part of the team responsible for tracking her down and catching her, and Mallon was ultimately quarantined for the rest of her life.
Baker’s contributions to the field of public health and hygiene were phenomenal and were especially ground-breaking in a time when medicine was considered purely a ‘men’s job’ and there were very few female physicians. Baker was a member of Heterodoxy – a feminist discussion and debate group, whose ideas were often radically ahead of their time, and where many of the members were lesbian or bisexual. Although she never publicly came out, and Baker seemingly destroyed many of her personal documents before her death, it is known that Baker spent the later years of her life with Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, a novelist from Australia who identified as a ‘woman-oriented woman’. They later moved to Princeton, New Jersey, alongside Louise Pearce, and Wylie wrote in her autobiography the three lived ‘amicably and even gaily together’. After Baker’s death, Pearce and Wylie continued to live together.