- Person
- Abraham Jacobi
- Lived
- 1830–1919
- Field
- Pediatrics
- From
- German-American
The story
Abraham Jacobi was born in 1830 in Hartum, Westphalia, the son of a poor Jewish shopkeeper. He earned his medical degree at Bonn in 1851, but his part in the revolutionary movement of 1848 led to arrest, a trial in Cologne at which he was acquitted, and a further prison term for insulting the Prussian king. In 1853 he emigrated to New York, where he began practising medicine among the city’s immigrant poor.
At the time, American medicine had no specialty for children. Infants and children were treated as small adults, and in the crowded neighbourhoods of New York many babies died of diarrhea, diphtheria and other infections. Jacobi believed that children’s illnesses needed their own study and their own care. In 1857 he was appointed to lecture on the diseases of children, and in 1860 New York Medical College created a chair of children’s diseases for him, the first such professorship in New York. In 1862 he opened a children’s clinic there, regarded as the first in the United States.
He went on to hold the chair of diseases of children at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1870 to 1902, and at Mount Sinai Hospital he organized the children’s ward and established the first department of pediatrics at a general hospital in the country. He was among the first doctors to insist on boiling milk for babies, an important defence against milk-borne infection before pasteurization was common, and among the first to treat children choking from diphtheria by passing a tube into the windpipe instead of performing a tracheotomy. His Treatise on Diphtheria (1876) long remained a standard work.
Jacobi also built the profession around these ideas. He helped found the American Pediatric Society, served as visiting physician to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and to the city’s infant hospital on Randall’s Island, and studied how European countries cared for abandoned children. In 1900 William Osler said that no one in the country had done as much for the bodily welfare of its infants. Jacobi died in 1919, and Jacobi Medical Center, a large public hospital in the Bronx, bears his name.
Why it matters
Children’s wards, pediatric departments and the training of pediatricians throughout the United States grew from the specialty Jacobi founded, so that sick children are treated by doctors trained for their needs.
About Abraham Jacobi
Westphalian-born physician, known as the father of American pediatrics, who opened the country’s first children’s clinic and made the medical care of children a specialty of its own.
Sources
- Abraham Jacobi Wikipedia
- Jacobi, Abraham Deutsche Biographie
- Abraham Jacobi Jewish Virtual Library
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.