• DOCTOR
  
• Champion of CHILDREN'S HEALTH CARE
• Decided to become a doctor after her father and brother died of typhoid
• Earned her medical degree at the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children (founded by Elizabeth Blackwell)
• FIRST woman to earn a doctorate in public health
• Worked as a medical inspector with the New York City Health Department, eventually becoming its leader for 25 years
• Visited city slums to teach mothers how to keep their children healthy by keeping them clean, eventually reducing the city's infant mortality rate to the lowest in the country
• Created a licensing system for midwives
• PIONEER in public health education, creating pamphlets and implementing school testing for infectious diseases
• Appalled by the high mortality rate of abandoned infants in hospitals, she began coordinating foster mothers to care for them instead
• Organized the Little Mother's League, which provided siblings and untrained babysitters with instruction for proper child care
• Founded the Bureau of Child Hygiene (originally the Babies Welfare Association), the FIRST tax-supported agency focused solely on children's health, a concept that would spread throughout the country at state and federal levels, as well as abroad
• Prompted New York University to CHANGE their sexist policy of not admitting women as postgraduate students when she refused a lectureship there because of it
• Held positions on numerous committees and organizations, including the College Women's Equal Suffrage League (of which she was a founding member), the American Medical Women's Association, the Child Hygiene Association, and the New York Academy of Medicine
• Served as a representative for the United States Health Committee to the League of Nations

Photo by U.S. National Library of Medicine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bibliography: Maggs, Sam. Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2016. Print.
Meek, Kerry L. "Baker, Sara Josephine." The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, Vol. 1. Routledge, 2000, 70-71.

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