by Lawrence Bush on May 5, 2012
Dr. Abraham Jacobi, who established the first children’s health clinic in the United States and pioneered the field of pediatrics, was born in Westphalia on this date in 1830. Jacobi was jailed for three years for his participation in the 1848 revolutionary movement in Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1853. His career here included professorships at the New York Medical College, in the medical department of the City University of New York, and at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he established the first pediatrics department at a general hospital in the U.S. In the course of his career, largely through his medical activism, pediatric clinics became fixtures of hospitals across the country. A lifelong socialist, Jacob corresponded with Karl Marx during the 1860s and was one of America’s earliest advocates of birth control. He studied and advocated breast-feeding, proposed safe breast-milk substitutes, and advocated the low-boiling of milk, which probably was the single greatest contribution before antibiotics to lowering infant mortality rates. Jacobi was the only foreign-born president of the American Medical Association in the AMA’s history. His wife, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, was author of more than 100 medical articles and a founder of the Consumer’s League in New York City.
“A child of three or four years may be saved by 100 or 200 ccm. of whiskey given daily, if by nothing else and escape the undertaker.” —Dr. Abraham Jacobi
by Lawrence Bush on April 27, 2012
Dr. Allan Rosenfield, an international family planning expert who helped abate the epidemic of mother-to-baby transmission of AIDS over the course of forty years of work, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on this date in 1933. A graduate of the medical school of Columbia University (where he spent much of his career as dean of the Mailman School of Public Heath), Rosenfield first led a birth control and women’s health effort in Thailand, using trained midwives to deliver maternal health care and birth control in a land that lacked a solid corps of doctors; his work brought the country’s birth rate down from 3.3 percent to 0.8 percent in thirty years.With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rosenfield created more than 85 “safe motherhood” programs worldwide, and in 2000, at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, he launched the MTCT-Plus Initiative, which has brought comprehensive health care and helped prevent mother-to-child transmission of AIDS within hundreds of thousands of families worldwide. He was national chairman of Planned Parenthood in 1985 and 1986, as well as of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Dr. Rosenfield died of ALS in 2008 at age 75.
“We tend to think of human rights as an argument to prevent governments from torturing citizens. But Allan argued passionately that maternal mortality was a human rights issue, and that governments had to be held accountable when they allowed women to die in vast numbers in childbirth, simply because they were poor, rural and female.” —Nicholas Kristof
by Lawrence Bush on April 17, 2012
The death of Albert Einstein on this date in 1955 brought messages of condolence to Princeton University from all around the world. Einstein had entered the hospital two days earlier and refused surgery — which, according to John Cameron Swazy’s NBC television report (focusing primarily on Einstein’s anti-nuclear weaponry activism), would not have spared the great scientist from dying from a burst artery. Since arriving at Princeton in 1933, Einstein had become widely known as an ethical leader, unafraid to speak out against the Cold War, McCarthyism, and racism, and in favor of socialism and one-world government, all of which earned him a 1,500-page FBI file. “No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge,” said President Dwight D. Eisenhower upon Einstein’s death. “Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly.”
“The word ‘god’ is for me nothing more than the expressions and products of human weakness, the Bible a collection of pleasurable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. . . . And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me from all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, though they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.” —Albert Einstein, letter dated January 3, 1954
by Lawrence Bush on April 4, 2012
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway PT, one of the most highly publicized and least successful inventions of the past two decades, was born on this date in 1951. The Segway is a very neat, ecological, self-balancing, two-wheeled low-speed transport that unfortunately has little use in hard-core urban environments or highway-dependent suburbs and rural areas. Kamen — the son of MAD magazine illustrator Jack Kamen — also invented the first drug infusion pump, an all-terrain electric wheelchair, and the Slingshot, an inexpensive water purification system. He is the founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which runs student competition all around the world in robotics and other technologies; more than a million young people have participated so far. Among his many honors is induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005 and the 2006 United Nations Global Humanitarian Action Award.
“I don’t work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.” —Dean Kamen
Dr. Abraham Jacobi, who established the first children’s health clinic in the United States and pioneered the field of pediatrics, was born in Westphalia on this date in 1830. Jacobi was jailed for three years for his participation in the 1848 revolutionary movement in Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1853. His career here included professorships at the New York Medical College, in the medical department of the City University of New York, and at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he established the first pediatrics department at a general hospital in the U.S. In the course of his career, largely through his medical activism, pediatric clinics became fixtures of hospitals across the country. A lifelong socialist, Jacob corresponded with Karl Marx during the 1860s and was one of America’s earliest advocates of birth control. He studied and advocated breast-feeding, proposed safe breast-milk substitutes, and advocated the low-boiling of milk, which probably was the single greatest contribution before antibiotics to lowering infant mortality rates. Jacobi was the only foreign-born president of the American Medical Association in the AMA’s history. His wife, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, was author of more than 100 medical articles and a founder of the Consumer’s League in New York City.
