Dr. Josephine Baker died in 1945, but she might have saved your life before you were born anyway.
That's kind of difficult to do, but that's not the most impressive thing about Baker.
She might have saved your life before your parents were born.
And because rhetoric travels most usefully in threes, I am basically now compelled to tell you, for the sake of semantic presentation, that she might have saved your life before your grandparents were born.
For Dr. Ramona Wong, who might have saved my life when I was born.
I don't know if she saved your life. However, if you had aspirated meconium -- which you didn't, because she pulled you out as soon as she could -- well, babies still die of that. And you did have meconium in your amniotic fluid. And your heart rate did go down towards the end of labor. And I did ask her if you'd be all right, and she said "I hope so."
My mother
If you read the story of Millicent Fawcett and remember the part about her sister trying like heck to find a medical school that would accept women, you will be pleased to know that things had progressed from 1860s England to 1890s New York.
As a result, Dr. Josephine Baker did not, in fact, have to help found a college or build a hospital to get her work started. (Millicent Fawcett and Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson politely refrained from scoffing at this comparative slacker, who can hardly be blamed for not being born in the hospital she founded.)
But she did have to work through other hardships.
Remember, do, that Millicent and Elizabeth had supportive parents to guide them through things.
In 1889, Josephine had, at 16, just lost her father and brother to typhoid, which was kind of insanely devastating at the time:
By 1890, the typhoid death rate in some cities exceeded 100 per 100,000 people.
The family had money, but with Josephine's father (a lawyer) dead, she had to abandon plans for Vassar College and find something that would pay.
Along the way she did not find something her mother thought she should do.
Or, in fact, that anyone thought she should do:
Discouragement from physicians of her acquaintance, from relatives, and, at first, from her mother only hardened her resolve.
Various sources tell us that she convinced her mother that it would not be that bad, and thank the stars for that because, as you shall soon see, many of you would not be here without her.
I wasn't there for the conversation wherein Josephine Baker and her mother, Jenny Baker, but I imagine it might have gone something very remotely like this:
Josephine: "Mother, I want to become a doctor."
Jenny: "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."
Josephine: "Oh, you have a better idea for making money?"
Jenny: "No, but every doctor we talked to told you to find another profession."
Josephine: "Because they all think a woman cannot be a doctor."
Jenny: "And you know better?"
Josephine: "I do. There's a school that was started by the first female doctor in this country. Her name is Elizabeth Blackwell, and her sister helped her found it, and there's this woman from Germany, and her grandmother was a vet, and -- "
Jenny: "And why didn't those other doctors know about any of this?"
Josephine: "Because they're busy being stupid sexist idiots who don't realize I'm going to change the face of public health and none of them will be remembered by anyone in more than 100 years when some long-haired wannabe hippy writes about this conversation?"
Jenny: " ... what was that last bit?"
Josephine: "I said, 'I'm going to go upstairs and start my private scientific study so I can pass a state medical test and attend the Women's Medical College, which is part of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.' "
Jenny: "Oh, OK. Yes, that makes a lot more sense than you talking about hippies. So it is probably best that you were not doing that because then I might have suspected you had a really high fever, such as the kind that comes with some of these really dreadful diseases you're going to help eradicate in the U.S."
Josephine: " ... what?"
Jenny: "I said go upstairs to study, and I'll call for you when dinner's ready."
Josephine: "What are you going to make?"
Jenny: "Something that will not give either of us food poisoning. It isn't in the plot."
Jenny: "I'll be upstairs studying if you need to ... talk."
Remember how I told you that Robert Smalls fought in 17 battles in the Civil War and I wasn't going to detail or dramatize his involvement in all of them because I didn't want the diary series to be 43 parts long?
This is like that. This is what happens when I go looking for people who should be famous but whom I have never heard of, only I ought to have heard of them.
For example, here is a rough summary of concerted U.S. public health efforts (aside from things like "Hey, get them wounded all in the same tent, Mr. Civil War doctor!") before Josephine:
People recommend that milk be pasteurized. Sometimes it was.
People recommended that maybe folks should not be drinking water that had just been visited by farm animals.
And a few other things.
Now, some of you new to the scene may be thinking to yourselves, "iampunha, stop being so dramatic!" (Well, I ever!) And in truth, there was more to public health back then, The push for pasteurization was particularly loud, and the push for sanitation so folks were not drinking feces-infested water was also loud.
Know what else was loud? The mothers of the thousands of babies dying every year because things like typhoid and dysentery and being too hot and drinking poisonous milk tend to kill people with weak immune systems.
So Josephine, after graduating from that medical school (which was absorbed by Cornell along with two other educational facilities a year or so after she got there -- thanks to cai for the tip) and trying a year at private practice, went to work for the city of New York.
And New York, in majestic and statuesque form, gave her its tired, its poor, its huddled masses yearning to breathe free and drink clean water. It sent her to Hell's Kitchen and also to schools, where she and truancy officers played a game called "This child is sick and needs to go home before she infects the quarter of the school that isn't sick."
She played that game pretty ferociously, and after a while, she had her own school nurse program. Few others existed. Now they're prevalent, and if you've ever had your hair combed with one of those white combs with the teeth so close together you'd swear the school nurse was using a carefully calibrated torture device, ... yeah, you can thank Josephine Baker for that:
The program worked so well that cases of head lice and the eye infection trachoma — once extremely prevalent in the schools — dropped to nearly zero.
So let's say you are a female Irish immigrant in New York in around ... 1908.
And let's say your husband was a steelworker before he fell to his death because that happens when you are working more than, say, five feet above ground, and because worker protections are afforded largely to the workers who wear jackets and ties and sit in their offices wondering why their building is not done already.
And let's say the stereotype of the Irish Catholic applies to you and you have seven kids (three of them younger than 4 years old) and you've just lost the largest weekly pay in the household. Now, you are not going to be able to earn a heaping helping of money yourself, but you probably can do more work and for longer than, say, your 8-year-old daughter.
However, you're not really sure about leaving your infant children home with a kid who is, well, a kid. Kids think about themselves a lot (which is why most of their stories start "I ..." and end "so that's why it wasn't my fault").
In walks Dr. Josephine Baker into your life. She sees that your area of the city has seen more baby deaths than just about anywhere else God ever saw fit to put a bunch of babies. We are talking "So who didn't have a baby die last year?" territory. (I joke because the alternative is phenomenally depressing, and I was phenomenally depressing yesterday anyway.)
Now, did Josephine want to make miniature mothers out of a bunch of kids?
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeell no:
I had a sincere conviction that they would all be better off dead than so degradingly alive. ... Here was a great waste. My problem was how to prevent it.
So she went about teaching girls how to take care of babies so their mothers could work. Ideal solution? No, but public health solutions in the beginning of the last century were less focused on perfection and more on bringing the infant mortality rate to (stop me if you've seen me use this phrase before) slightly south of soul-killingly insane.
Josephine did this by going to the slums of New York (which she had been introduced to in her first days as a medical inspector) and teaching mothers and their daughters of sufficient age about basics like breastfeeding and how to regulate an infant's body temperature, since babies are great at telling you something is wrong but lousy at say, "Pardon me, mother, but I can't help noticing part of me is melting" unless they are Stewie Griffin.
The sources for this part of the diary say infant mortality fell by 1,200 that summer, which is when a lot of babies were dying on account of the ridiculous heat in New York (summer motto: "How's that Northeast thing working for you?"). They do not say what the rate was anywhere else, so it is hard to say statistically how significant this was.
How many people are alive now because of those 1,200 babies -- and how many more because that one summer's effort was enacted citywide and then statewide and then nationwide? Ever gone to the grocery store and seen rows upon rows of baby formula?
Time was, formula and nonhuman sources of milk were plainly not safe. Remember the scandal when Chinese baby formula was found to have melamine? This stuff was worse. And even when it was not going to kill you, so too was it not going to feed you, which is really just as bad.
Fifteen years later, New York had the lowest infant mortality rate of any place that reported its infant mortality rate. It had dropped more than half in 16 years.
If you cut in half the number of people who are dying from anything, you ought by God and all else holy to be made immortal. For my money, it is more impressive than curing polio or smallpox because infant mortality is and was not due to any one thing (bolding mine):
However, the fact remains that we cannot expect any marked reduction in the baby death rate without a proper adjustment of the many social, economic, and sanitary problems that we have discussed . . . and added to these must be an intelligent use of what we call “public health education.”
Summing up the forces which cause infant mortality in a way that they may be used as a background for our programs for prevention of baby sickness and death, we may consider the two groups who control these forces and who therefore must take part in their proper adjustment. First, we have the community as a whole. Here we must fix the responsibility for decent housing, proper sewage disposal, a safe and pure milk and water supply, opportunities for outdoor recreation, proper living conditions, and the adjustment of economic forces so that they will provide a living wage for all families. Second, we have the individual father and mother, who must be taught to make use of the community resources and to so apply them in their own family that their baby may receive the greatest degree of protection and be assured of good health.
To change all of these things, you must be part sociologist, part politician, part doctor and part teacher.
Fortunately, English has come up with a phrase for such a person.
Tireless advocate?
Passionate public health worker?
Dedicated medical practitioner?
All viable, but incomplete.
The phrase:
Dr. Josephine Baker.
I break from my light-hearted take on this subject long enough to link you to this account. Bear in mind after you get to the part were Josephine is said to be very young that in 1915, when the account was written, Josephine was 42 and had been working for the city health department for 14 years.
Now, here is the funny thing about all of this.
First of all, as many of you have no doubt figured out lo these many years of equality being an aspiration, not a realization, if you are not an able-bodied white, Christian man in America, you are going to meet people who doubt you or disparage you because of that.
In the 1920s, this was slightly more pronounced than now -- in the sense that in the 1920s, there were slightly fewer people in America than there are now.
Correspondingly, having a woman lead a medical effort like the Bureau of Child Hygiene -- which was born of that whole saving giant piles of babies in massively poor areas -- was, how do we say, rather poorly received.
Josephine won:
Dr. Baker was appointed director of the city’s new Bureau of Child Hygiene from 1908 to 1923. This was a time when women were not appointed as Public officials and when she was first appointed director, the six physicians who had been her peers as medical inspectors “all resigned because of the disgrace of working for a woman. But she convinced all six to stay. Some resented the fact that a female physician was in charge of a city bureau, and, in 1919, there was considerable pressure to remove her from her position. However, she received great public support from the local press and from mothers who marched to the mayor’s office to protest her possible dismissal.
Sample hypothetical conversation:
Mother 1: "Keep Dr. Baker looking after our children!"
City paper pusher: "This city needs a man to lead its effort to maintain public health."
Mother 1: "She saved my daughter's life!"
PP: "Madam, I hardly think -- "
Mother 1: ::glares:: "She ... saved ... my ... daughter's ... life. And then my son's, a year later. And nobody in our whole neighborhood has had typhoid or cholera in two years."
PP: ::looks suspicious:: " ... nobody?"
Mother 2: "Nobody. And my children are very healthy and my color has improved remarkably."
PP: "Well, aren't you just -- "
Mother 2: "And my husband's boxing career has really taken off."
PP: "Boxing."
Mother 2: "Heavyweight."
PP: "So we should just leave Miss Baker -- "
Mothers 1 and 2: "Doctor Baker."
PP: "Doctor Baker in her position and then people will keep being healthy and living long and productive lives?"
Mother 1: "I see our work here is done."
Second of all, while Josephine Baker and various others (I'm looking gratefully at you, Dr. Dorothy Mendenhall, Lillian Wald and Julia Lanthrop) were off busily trying to keep people from dying before they could get all angsty about life in the ghetto, some doctors were busily railing against the effect this health garbage would have on their practices:
If we’re going to save the lives of all the women and children at public expense, what incentive will there be for a young man to go into medicine?
Physician opposing the Little Mothers League, which saved 1,200 lives in one summer
[The Bureau of Child Hygiene is] ruining medical practice by its results in keeping babies well.
Portion of petition from 30 Brooklyn physicians
One suspects the doctors in question did not have many repeat customers.
One has no idea why ...
Now, one of the things about people is that some of them are very good at playing the crowd, and some of them just want to sit and be alone and get their work done. For example, insufficiently famous math, logic and code-breaking unique talent Alan Turing was known to be frankly pretty shy and weird around people, especially women (not so much men, which made sense on account of he was pretty thoroughly gay), but he was an absolute force when you gave him some work to do that nobody else could do and you left him the bloody hell alone and then he saved tens of thousands of lives.
Josephine Baker worked with people. She worked with a ton of poor people, including her work with Typhoid Mary, whom she captured twice. (News of her death was totally not exaggerated.) She played the media well, getting more money for public health so she could start saving the lives of not only babies but also young children and their mothers. (And she got away with it, too, with the help of those meddling kids and their dog.)
And by and by, she came to be desired by some not-so-poor people.
Specifically, New York University--Bellevue Hospital Medical School wanted her to lecture.
I imagine the conversations went rather like this:
NYU administrator: "Ring ring ring."
Josephine: "We're not on the phone. I'm sitting in your office."
NYU admin: "Oh, there is that. Anyhoo, we were wondering if you would like to lecture at our school and talk about child hygiene and how you saved however many thousands of lives that one summer."
Josephine: "Well, hmm. I'll do that if -- "
NYU admin: "Excellent!"
Josephine: "I was not done yet. I'll do that if you'll admit me as a student."
NYU admin: "BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh they told me you were smart, and I thought they were daft for thinking that, but they did not tell me you were so funny! We will never in 14 Brazillian years admit a woman. What are you, on that chalk-based milk you got people to stop selling?"
Josephine: "What do you think it says about a school that will not allow a lecturer to attend? Surely if I am smart enough to be teaching, I am smart enough to -- "
NYU admin: "It ain't that, honey -- "
Josephine: "Dr. Baker."
NYU admin: "Right, sure. Dr. Baker. Anyway, we don't care about who's smart enough. It's just that you're a woman. Anyway, no dice on learning here, only talking to our male students. We'll find a man who can do the job -- and maybe he'll have that great sense of humor, eh?"
...
Three months later:
NYU admin: "So, Gerard, how are we doing finding a man to talk to our students about child hygiene?"
Gerard: "We aren't."
NYU admin: "Whaddya mean? I thought I told you to go out and find the male Josephine Baker."
Gerard: "There isn't one."
NYU admin: "Just get her husband to tell stories about his wife's work. It can't be that hard to talk about saving babies from being poisoned."
Gerard: "She's not married, sir."
NYU admin: "Not married."
Gerard: "And it gets worse, sir."
NYU admin: "Worse?"
Gerard: "Yes, sir. The list you told me to compile of people who are qualified to speak on child hygiene and have the skills and experience necessary ... they're all women."
NYU admin: "THEY'RE ALL BLOODY WOMEN?"
Gerard: "Yes, sir. And most of the prominent men even involved in the scene are doctors protesting the fact that babies are living."
NYU admin: "Why is that a problem?"
Gerard: "Because the, er, point of child hygiene is that the babies live, sir. So inviting a man to talk about this would be like George Washington Carver here to talk about the evils of peanuts."
NYU admin: "George Carver who?"
Gerard: " ... look, the point is that Dr. Baker is, forgive the expression, the best man for the job."
NYU admin: "But she's a WOMAN. And she wants to study HERE."
Gerard: "Yes, sir."
NYU admin: "Do you know what would do to our reputation?"
Gerard: "It would make us a school with Josephine Baker as a student. That could get us some ... free publicity."
NYU admin: "Free press ... if we admit a woman."
Gerard: "The nation's foremost authority on the subject as a student and lecturer here, sir. It might be quite good for us in the long run."
NYU admin: "I'm glad I thought of it. I'll run this past the regents and write Miss Baker soon."
...
One week later:
NYU admin: "Miss Baker."
Josephine: "Dr. Baker."
NYU admin: "Right, yes. Dr. Baker. After much careful thought, we have decided that you are to be considered for acceptance into our doctoral program in public health."
Josephine: "And is that what I asked for?"
NYU admin: "Yes."
Josephine: "Is it?"
NYU admin: "Who are you, Troy Polamalu?"
Josephine: "Who's that?"
NYU admin: "Nevermind. Anyway, I suppose that is not what you asked for. Darn you for seeing through my ruse. Yes, you're a student here if you're lecturing here."
Josephine: "Excellent. When is my first -- "
NYU admin: Next week. You'll discuss lecture topics with the dean of the school."
Josephine: "Day of class?"
NYU admin: "Oh, uh ... talk to the registrar. I don't know those things. Now, I have work to do, so if you don't mind ... "
Two years later, she had the first doctorate in public health earned by a woman. And she published five books and a giant pile of articles and was active in other causes, such as getting to be among the first female doctors in the U.S. to vote. And various sources say she said she was a "woman-oriented woman" but do not say exactly what that means, though I have to think it is not that hard to guess (especially if you do not mind being wrong).
And she might have saved your life without even being around to see you live it. Pretty neat, huh?