StemCell Therapy

Mallons distrust of Baker was not an isolated incident: trust in public health was unevenly distributed among communities, Conis says. For instance, many immigrants came from countries where government-enforced vaccinations were unheard of. The power Baker wielded as a municipal authority was wholly unfamiliar.

Stereotypes about immigrant communities including those to which Baker herself subscribed further hampered trust in public health.

In her autobiography, Baker frequently refers to Irish immigrants en masse as shiftless, and says of the Irish in Hells Kitchen that they were altogether charming in their abject helplessness, wholly lacking in any ambition and dirty to unbelievable degree. In Bakers view, the only other group who could match the Irish distinction of living in the most squalor was Russian Jews, who managed to survive out of thrift.

For communities so frequently maligned and stereotyped, trust was not easily given just because someone with Bakers authority asked for it.

What Baker never seemed to understand about the immigrant communities she served was that when her advice was ignored, it often wasnt a failure of understanding. Rather, it was that those, like Mallon, who she explained the science of germs to, had little control over their own lives and circumstances.

Even though Baker retired from the Bureau of Child Hygiene in 1923, her work extended beyond the health department. She was prolific writer, publishing hundreds of journal and newspaper articles on public health and five books on child health and hygiene for non-experts. She also founded the American Child Hygiene Association, of which she became president in 1917, and served as president of the Womens Medical Association in 1935.

Baker spent the last years of her storied life on a farm in New Jersey with her partner, the novelist and screenwriter Ida Wylie, and their friend, physician Louise Pearce. She died of cancer in 1945.

While she went to greater lengths than any other public health official to learn the needs of tenement residents, Baker never seemed to quite understand why some greeted her and her municipal authority with scepticism. Nor did she reflect on the role she may have played in perpetuating that distrust.

Had she done so, its easy to imagine how many more lives she could have saved. As it is, however, she deserves a reputation as one of the earliest and most influential crusaders for preventative public health and provides an example of not only what to do, but what not to do, when it comes to public health.

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Missed Genius

Ask people to imagine a scientist, and many of us will picture the same thing a heterosexual white male. Historically, a number of challenges have made it much more difficult for those who dont fit that stereotype to enter fields like science, math or engineering.

There are, however, many individuals from diverse backgrounds who have shaped our understanding of life and the Universe, but whose stories have gone untold until now. With our new BBC Future column, we are celebrating the missed geniuses who made the world what it is today.

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Portrait of S. J. Baker by Emmanuel Lafont.

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SJ Baker: The woman who transformed public health - BBC News

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