A shopkeeper’s son in Westphalia
Abraham Jacobi was born on May 6, 1830, in the village of Hartum, near Minden in the Prussian province of Westphalia. His father, Leser Jacoby, was a poor Jewish shopkeeper, and his mother was Julie Abel. The family had little money, and his parents educated him at great sacrifice, sending him to the gymnasium in Minden, the nearest town with a classical secondary school.
From 1847 he studied at the universities of Greifswald, Göttingen and Bonn. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica he began with Semitic languages before turning to medicine. He received his doctorate in medicine at Bonn in 1851. For a young Jewish man from a village household, a university degree was itself a remarkable climb, and it came at a moment when the whole of German society was in upheaval.
Revolution, prison and exile
As a student Jacobi threw himself into the revolutionary movement of 1848, which demanded constitutional government and civil rights across the German states, and into the socialist student circles of the time. When the revolution was crushed, the Prussian authorities pursued its supporters. Jacobi was arrested in 1851 and held in prisons in Berlin and Cologne. In 1852 he was a defendant in the Cologne Communist Trial and was acquitted, but he was then convicted of lèse-majesté, the crime of insulting the king, and held in jail at Minden and Bielefeld until 1853.
On his release he left Germany for good. He went first to England, where he stayed with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the autumn of 1853 he sailed for New York. He kept up a correspondence with Marx and Engels for some years and in 1857 helped found the New York Communist Club. Over time his political energy turned toward practical reform: he became an advocate of civil service reform and of birth control, and an opponent of prohibition. His youthful politics were part of the reason he arrived in America at all, and the doctor who came ashore was a refugee with a medical degree and almost nothing else.
A doctor for children
In the 1850s there was no such thing as a children’s doctor in the United States. Sick infants and children were treated as small adults, if they were treated at all, and in the crowded tenements of New York a large share of babies died before their first birthday from diarrhea, diphtheria and infections. Jacobi set up a medical practice among the city’s poor immigrants and quickly became convinced that children’s diseases needed their own study.
In 1857 he was appointed to lecture on the illnesses of children. In 1860 New York Medical College created a chair of children’s diseases for him, the first such professorship in New York, and in 1862 he opened a clinic for children there, regarded as the first children’s clinic in the United States. He went on to hold the chair of diseases of children at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University from 1870 to 1902. At Mount Sinai Hospital he organized the children’s ward and established the first department of pediatrics at a general hospital in the country, a model that hospitals across America later copied.
What he taught the country
Jacobi’s influence came as much from his teaching and writing as from his clinics. He wrote on teething, infant diet and diphtheria, the throat infection that killed thousands of children every year, and his Treatise on Diphtheria of 1876 long remained a standard work. He contributed chapters on the care and feeding of children to the leading German handbook of children’s diseases. He was among the first doctors to insist that milk for babies be boiled, a simple step that cut the infections spread by contaminated milk long before pasteurization was routine, and he was among the first to treat children choking from diphtheria by passing a tube into the windpipe rather than cutting open the throat.
He also looked beyond the sickbed to the conditions that made children ill. His book The Raising and Education of Abandoned Children in Europe (1870) studied how other countries cared for foundlings, and he served as visiting physician to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and to the infant hospital on Randall’s Island, where the city housed abandoned babies. He was also a visiting physician at the German Hospital from 1857 and at Bellevue Hospital from 1874, so that his methods reached patients across the city’s public and charitable hospitals. He brought bedside instruction into medical teaching, so that students learned by examining patients rather than only by listening to lectures.
Building a profession
Jacobi helped turn pediatrics from one man’s interest into an organized specialty. He co-edited the American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children from 1868 to 1871 and was a founder of the American Pediatric Society. He served as president of the New York State Medical Society in 1882 and of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1885, and late in life he was elected president of the American Medical Association. He remains the only foreign-born physician to have held that office.
His practical guides for doctors, among them Infant Diet (1874) and Therapeutics of Infancy and Childhood (1895), were widely used; the latter reached a third edition in 1903. His collected papers were published in eight volumes as Collectanea Jacobi. Near the end of his life he wrote histories of pediatrics in the United States and in New York, chronicling a field that barely existed when he arrived. On his seventieth birthday in 1900, William Osler, the most celebrated physician in America, said that no one in the country had done as much for the bodily welfare of its infants.
How children benefit today
Today it seems obvious that children should be cared for by doctors trained for them, in wards built for them, and that a sick baby is not simply a small adult. That assumption is Jacobi’s legacy. The pediatric departments of modern hospitals, the training of pediatricians, the attention to infant feeding and clean milk, and the idea that public authorities share responsibility for the health of poor and abandoned children all have roots in the institutions he built in New York.
The fall in child mortality in the century after his death had many causes, from clean water to vaccines and antibiotics. But each of those advances reached children through the specialty Jacobi helped found, whose doctors knew how children’s bodies differ and how their illnesses progress. Jacobi Medical Center, one of New York City’s large public hospitals in the Bronx, carries his name, serving the same kind of working families he cared for as a young immigrant doctor.
A Jewish immigrant in New York medicine
Jacobi came from a poor Jewish family in rural Westphalia at a time when Jews in Prussia still faced legal barriers in public life, and his path into medicine and then into exile reflected both the opportunities and the dangers of that generation. In New York he worked within the city’s German and Jewish immigrant world as well as far beyond it. Mount Sinai, where he founded his pediatrics department, was the hospital established by the city’s Jewish community, and he was a visiting physician there from 1860. He also served the Hebrew Orphan Asylum.
The sources say little about his religious practice; his public life centred on medicine, reform and civic causes rather than on religious institutions. His entry appears in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, which notes his early study of Semitic languages, and Jewish organizations have long honoured him as the founder of American pediatrics.
Family, loss and later years
Jacobi’s first wife, Fanny Meier, died in 1856; she was the sister of Sophie Meyer Boas, mother of the anthropologist Franz Boas. In 1873 he married Mary Putnam, a pioneering physician who had been the first woman to study at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris. Mary Putnam Jacobi became one of the most important women in American medicine, and the couple were partners in both medicine and reform. They had three children, but only their daughter Marjorie survived to adulthood. Mary died in 1906.
Jacobi kept working into old age. During the First World War he spoke out strongly against the German imperial government. In the summer of 1918 a fire at his house on Lake George destroyed the manuscript of his autobiography and many of his papers. He died at his summer home in Bolton Landing, New York, on July 10, 1919, at the age of 89, and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Legacy
Abraham Jacobi arrived in New York as a political refugee and left behind a new branch of medicine. The first children’s clinic, the first chair of pediatrics, the first pediatric department in a general hospital and a professional society to carry the work forward were all his doing or carried his stamp. His papers are held by the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, and a park at Bolton Landing honours him alongside his friend Carl Schurz, another German émigré of 1848.
He is remembered as the father of American pediatrics not for a single discovery but for an idea that he turned into institutions: that children deserve medicine designed for them. Every children’s ward and every pediatrician’s office in the United States is, in a sense, part of that inheritance.
Sources & further reading
Abraham Jacobi, Wikipedia · Jacobi, Abraham, Deutsche Biographie · Abraham Jacobi, Jewish Virtual Library · Jacobi, Abraham, Encyclopaedia Judaica via Encyclopedia.com · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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