Public health professional Sara Josephine Baker was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on November 15, 1873. She earned her medical degree at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary. Best known for her contributions to children’s health and medicine, Baker served as the director of the Bureau of Child Hygiene and founded the American Child Hygiene Association. While Baker destroyed many of the records of her personal life, she lived for many years with novelist I.A.R. Wylie and later also with Dr. Louise Pearce. You can learn more about Baker’s life in Karisa Butler-Wall’s Outhistory exhibit: Sara Josephine Baker: Public Health Pioneer, 1873-1945, by Karisa Butler-Wall.