Creating a Narrative of Life: Public Health Through the Eyes of Dr. Sara Josephine Baker (2016)
Cecala, Rebecca K. (Author)
Kupfer, Charles D. (Advisor)
Pennsylvania State University
Kupfer, Charles D.
Physical Details: 272 pp.
Language: English
During the Progressive era (1890-1920), New York City was the largest city in the United States and its bacteriological lab and health department helped pioneer American public preventative health. New York was likewise home to a rapidly growing population of immigrants made vulnerable to disease through the unlivable conditions of tenement housing and poverty. Living from 1873-1945, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker was director of New York City’s Bureau of Child Hygiene: the first woman to be appointed a municipal public health official in the United States. Baker witnessed the professionalization of the field of public health and participated in its transition from municipal sanitation to preventative medicine. Baker is chiefly remembered in scholarship for her role in the apprehension of typhoid carrier Mary Mallon (“Typhoid Mary”) and for using preventative health to reduce infant mortality. However, Baker’s perspective on the meaning of her work and the larger role of public health in American society has not been examined, and is relevant to twenty-first century preventative health strategies for mothers and infants. In this study Baker’s perspective on the role of public health in society is examined through her autobiography and public writing, couched within the cultural context of progressive reform, the professionalization of the fields of public health and medicine, and the national discussion surrounding individual vs. state and expert vs. non-expert responsibility for child welfare. Key issues to the development of public health are examined, putting Baker’s voice in conversation with other public health officials, reformers, physicians, and politicians of her time. Through Baker’s perspective the role of public health in society clearly emerges as a “narrative of life.” Utilizing Baker as a lens, this study argues that as a new field public health had an opportunity to help define modern industrial American society as one that demonstrated its value for life through the protection of its most vulnerable citizens: infants. Baker recognized that a public service requiring the cooperation of federal and local governments, families, public health workers, nonprofits and medical experts required a narrative that made the work meaningful to all stakeholders. For publicly funded preventative health to maintain the long-term support of those groups and to remain relevant to those it served, Baker believed that the narrative would have to be rewritten for each new generation.
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