Sara Josephine Baker was a pioneer in public health care and preventive medicine in the early part of the twentieth century. Josephine Baker (as she preferred to be called) was born into a wealthy New York family. When her father died, she decided to become a physician, an unheard of ambition for girls of that time. Finding herself ill-prepared for medical school, Baker studied biology and chemistry at home for a year before applying to the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, one of the few colleges that offered women work in medical clinics. She entered school at 18 and received her M.D. in 1898. Baker first served as an intern at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston where she learned the harsh realities of sickness and death in turn-of-the-century slums. Once, while taking care of a sick woman...