Adelaide Dutcher (
fl.
''Floruit'' (; abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for "they flourished") denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indicatin ...
1901) was an American
physician and
public health worker who was the first American to stress the social origins of
tuberculosis.
Life
When Adelaide Dutcher was a student in the
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she worked with
William Osler, head of the department of medicine, on a research project to study the environmental causes of tuberculosis. During this study, she interviewed 190 outpatients, both white and black, who lived in the slums of
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was ...
, and were so poor that they needed to work regardless of their health. "Dutcher identified the elemental problems: crowding, filth, darkness, lack of ventilation, appalling ignorance of the contagiousness of tuberculosis, and carelessness with infectious materials. She thought that education could correct many of the sanitary deficiencies of the poor" and published her conclusions in ''Where the Danger Lies in Tuberculosis'' that appeared in the ''Philadelphia Medical Journal'' in 1900. In the article she urged the formation of an educational campaign about the nature and prevention of tuberculosis and stressed that housing represented a primary source of infection. She reported that many patients stated they became ill only after moving into quarters known to have been occupied previously by victims of the disease. Nothing is known of her further life.
[Ogilvie & Harvey, pp. 791–92]
Notes
References
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Dutcher, Adelaide
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine alumni
20th-century American physicians
20th-century American women physicians