5. De como a médica sem cara de médica mudou
radicalmente as condições de vida da “Cozinha do Inferno”:
“Until then, the Health Department had sought to
track down sick children and refer them to physicians, a mostly futile endeavor
in the days before antibiotics and modern medicine. Baker decided that the new
bureau’s mission would instead be prevention. The city had an established and efficient
system of birth registration. As soon as a child was born, her name and address
were reported to the Health Department. Baker reasoned that if every new mother
were properly taught how to feed and care for a baby and recognize the signs of
illness, the mother would have a much better chance of keeping the child alive.
In her first year at the Bureau of Child Hygiene,
Baker sent nurses to the most deadly ward on the Lower East Side. They were to
visit every new mother within a day of delivery, encouraging exclusive
breast-feeding, fresh air, and regular bathing, and discouraging hazardous
practices such as feeding the baby beer or allowing him to play in the gutter.
This advice was entirely conventional, but the results were extraordinary: that
summer, 1,200 fewer children died in that district compared to the previous
year; elsewhere in the city the death rate remained high. The home-visiting
program was soon implemented citywide, and in 1910, a network of “milk
stations” staffed by nurses and doctors began offering regular baby
examinations and safe formula for older children and the infants of women who
couldn’t breast-feed. In just three years, the infant death rate in New York
City fell by 40 percent, and in December 1911, The New York Times hailed
the city as the healthiest in the world.”
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