Literature and Medicine I

16President Theodore Roosevelt, aware of local corruption, dispatched Dr. Edward T. Devine, the General Secretary of the Charity Organization of New York to direct relief efforts in San Francisco (United States House of Representatives 46). Only a year before, the Red Cross had been reorganized to be a clearinghouse for relief services to deal with natural disasters. As yet, the Red Cross remained untested. Roosevelt instructed Devine to consolidate funds and resources from twenty representative national and international Red Cross organizations for earthquake relief during a period of experimentation before the Army withdrawal. Roosevelt appointed an experimental relief commission, headed by Devine, which included Col. George Pippy, and a Mr. P. J. Moran to distribute emergency funds. On April 25, Roosevelt announced to the public that the Army had “succeeded in caring for 300,000 homeless in the last five days” (United States House of Representatives 44, 58; Young). Divine was called back to New York, so the Relief Commission turned over its work to the San Francisco Relief and Red Cross Funds Corporation on July 20, 1906. The Corporation was established in order to address issues of general rehabilitation, permanent shelter, employment, care of the sick, and the settling of insurance claims.

“Building Upon Her Political Capital”

17Historian Rickey Hendricks stated that Dr. Adelaide Brown’s pure milk campaign commenced after the 1906 earthquake and fire severely damaged hospitals as well as the city’s sanitation system (64). Brown worked as secretary for the Medical Milk Commission of the San Francisco County Medical Society (1907-12), and in 1912 she became president of the California Medical Milk Commission. The question of milk safety came to the fore as scientists devised a new technique for detecting whether milk had been tainted with bovine tuberculosis and other deadly bacteria. At this time she became an active member of the Commission for Prevention of Infant Mortality, the Baby Hygiene Society, and the Milk Improvement Association. Brown chaired a sub-committee of the Citizen’s Milk Committee for the San Francisco Federation of Women’s Clubs, charged with the task of investigating San Francisco’s milk supply and its relation to public health (Leonard, ed. 132). The sub-committee inspected dairies in Marin, Alameda, Santa Clara, and San Francisco counties, and included dairies at Soledad Prison. Brown established the Mother’s Milk Bank, sponsored by the Federations Baby Hygiene Committee in 1908, which also provided a Visiting Nurse Service.

18In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt summoned Brown to attend the White House Conference on Children and Youth, and she helped to establish a “Day Crèche” for infants of female cannery workers at the Telegraph Hill Settlement the same year. Dr. Adelaide Brown could not carry on her mother’s vision of women physicians caring for women and children in this rapidly changing environment; she had to define and follow her own course. Brown, a proponent for women’s suffrage, served as Vice President of the College Equal Suffrage League of California. Women in California gained the vote without assistance from the national women’s suffrage movement. Supporters utilized billboard advertising, drew large crowds to rallies with free entertainment, distributed literature, and hired a railroad car to carry their campaign to small-town whistle stops. In San Francisco, liquor industry lobbyists thought they could defeat women’s suffrage by controlling the urban vote (Weatherford 194). Indeed, San Francisco ballot boxes were guarded to prevent fraud or ballot discards that might cancel out the rural vote. The attention paid to rural areas paid off when votes were counted, and California women won the vote with a tiny margin of one vote per precinct. Brown remembered:

In 1911, when I cast my first vote at 43, not at 21 years of age, I was perfectly sure my state and my city would be more interesting to me, as a voter, than my nation. Time has emphasized this conclusion. (“Why I Am Voting”)

19Under the aegis of the County Medical Association, Dr. Adelaide Brown led the Milk Commission’s initiative to deliver certified milk to San Francisco schools, hospitals, and settlement homes. She worked with the American Association of University Women’s Certified Milk Fund Committee on a fundraising campaign to raise the difference between raw milk ($.05 per quart) and certified milk ($13 per quart) to supply milk to “boarded-out” babies of working mothers under the auspices of Associated Charities (today known as United Way). This fund also supplied milk to infants at the Telegraph Hill Settlement, the Florence Crittenden Home, and children’s hospitals in Oakland and San Francisco (Hendricks 64).

20Pippy, wanting to remain on the forefront of emerging dairy industry technology, worked with Brown to stay ahead of Nathan Strauss. Pippy reminisced:

Strauss was genuinely surprised to find how downtodate [SIC] our big dairies were. He came to talk pasteurization of milk, prepared to acquaint us with the novelty. He found pasteurization of milk carried on in all the big San Francisco dairies. He found dairy conditions in San Francisco better than in New York or Chicago. We owe that to the splendid work done by the last few Boards of Health and by the excellent Milk Commission headed by Dr. Adelaide Brown. (O’Day 239-40)