Leona Baumgartner (1902-1991): Leader in Domestic and International Public Health

Abstract

LEONA BAUMGARTNER BROKE many barriers. In 1954, she was the first woman ever to hold the post of Commissioner of Public Health in New York City. In 1959, she became the second female president of the American Public Health Association. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy appointed her to head the Office of Technical Cooperation and Research in the newly created Agency for International Development (USAID). At that time, she was the highest ranking woman in the US government. Baumgartner was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1902 to Swiss immigrant parents. The family moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1904 when her father, a zoologist, accepted a position with the University of Kansas. Baumgartner earned her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Kansas and became a Rockefeller Research Fellow at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich, Germany. She then completed her PhD in immunology and MD at Yale University. She was a resident in pediatrics at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center from 1934 to 1936 and then served a year with the US Public Health Service. In 1937, Baumgartner joined the New York City Department of Health, the agency at which she spent most of her career despite taking brief sabbaticals to manage emergency maternity and infant care clinics for the families of military personnel during World War II and to serve in the late 1940s as associate director of the US Children's Bureau.1 In the Department of Health, Baumgartner rose steadily through the ranks. She was successively director of training, district health officer, director of the Bureau of Child Hygiene, assistant commissioner for Maternal and Child Health Services, and Commissioner of Health. Baumgartner left the department in 1962 to head the newly created office at USAID. Among her notable accomplishments in this position was to persuade President Lyndon Johnson to reverse longstanding US policy and allow USAID to support birth control and family planning programs in developing countries.2 Despite her continuous employment with the New York City Department of Health, Baumgartner had already established a reputation in international health before taking the USAID job. In 1945, she served as an advisor to the French Ministry of Health and in 1955 performed a similar function for the Indian Ministry of Health.3 In 1958, she spent 5 weeks in the Soviet Union as part of a United States–Soviet Union cultural exchange program.4 Within the American Public Health Association, she supported efforts to foster greater international awareness and outreach and helped overcome resistance from those in the organization who thought it should be strictly focused on domestic health issues.5 During her term as president (1958-1959), she obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to assist in moving the association more fully into the international health field. In 1966, Baumgartner left USAID to become visiting professor of social medicine at Harvard. She remained actively involved in public health after her retirement in 1972 and received many honors and awards, including the Sedgwick Medal of the American Public Health Association, the Public Welfare Award of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Distinguished Alumna Award of New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center.6 She died at the age of 88 on January 15, 1998, in Chilmark, Massachusetts.