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 Marc Jampole on March 22, 2012
With the Supreme Court considering multiple challenges to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 next week, OpEdge readers might want to delve into the long-term history of health care reform in the United States. If so, there is no better place to go than Paul Starr’s recent Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar Struggle over Health Care Reform, which traces health care reform from the earliest proposals for government-sponsored health insurance just before and during World War I.
Starr is without a doubt the guy to tackle the subject. Since its 1984 publication, his Social Transformation of American Medicine has become established not just as the seminal work in the narrow field of health care, but as one of the very most important books of American social history. Since then, Starr has taught, conducted historical research into both health care and the media and served as a senior health care advisor for Bill Clinton. He is co-editor of The American Prospect. [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on March 3, 2012
Dr. Hilde Bruch, a pediatrician who fled from Nazi Germany in 1933, published the first of several works on obesity and eating disorders in young people, The Importance of Overweight, on this date in 1957. Bruch, who lost to the Nazis two siblings as well as the man she intended to marry, trained as a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins. She became a leading authority on anorexia nervosa (“nervous loss of appetite”), which affects females almost exclusively, and which she identified as a “psycho-social illness” associated with developmental deficits and skewed self-image that are imposed by the culture’s sexist expectations. “You have to convince [sufferers that] they are capable, honest, lovable, warm people. When they feel that good about themselves, treatment is finished. It’s a pretty big job,” said Bruch. Her collected work was published in 1973 under the title Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within. She also wrote The Golden Cage (1979), a book filled with case histories, and Conversations with Anorexics, which was published posthumously in 1988.
“Girls with conforming personalities feel obliged to do something that demands a great degree of independence in order to be respected and recognized. When they get stuck, the only independence they feel they have is to control their bodies.” —Hilde Bruch
by Lawrence Bush on February 26, 2012
U.S. Patent No. 644,077 for “Acetylsalicylic Acid,” generally known as aspirin, was assigned on this date in 1900 to Felix Hoffman, a German chemist who worked in the pharmaceutical laboratory of Friedrich Bayer & Co. Nearly half a century later, however, in 1949, a German Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrün, would claim that he had instructed Hoffmann to synthesize the compound, which Hoffman had done without even knowing its purpose. While interned in the Terezin concentration camp in 1944, Eichengrün wrote a letter (now in the Bayer archives) staking his claim, but he was unable to pursue the matter before dying in 1949. Eichengrün had left Bayer in 1908 to establish his own factory in Berlin and became a successful industrialist based on his development of other drugs as well as cellulose acetate, acetate silk, and acetate safety film.
“The most reasonable conclusion is that Arthur Eichengrün was telling the truth when he wrote that acetylsalicylic acid was synthesised under his direction and that the drug would not have been introduced in 1899 without his intervention.” —Walter Sneader
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.
