730 - Women's History Month: A Conversation With Sue Baker, the "Mother of Injury Prevention"
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2024
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Sue Baker started her research career in the 1960s, there was no field devoted to injury prevention despite accidents being a leading cause of death in the US. In honor of Women's History Month, Stephanie Desmon talks with injury prevention pioneer Baker about her half century of research looking at everything from aviation safety to hot dog choking deaths, and her hands-on approach to research which included getting her pilot's license, working in a medical examiner's office, and driving a commercial truck.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:32.1 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:34.3 | Today, in honor of Women's History Month, Stephanie Desmond talks to a legend in public |
| 0:39.3 | health, retired Hopkins professor Sue Baker, who spent half a century working to better understand |
| 0:45.4 | why injuries happen and what tools can be used to prevent them. She earned a pilot's license to |
| 0:51.4 | study aviation safety. Her work on childhood injuries led to the widespread use of car seats. |
| 0:57.8 | Her work on choking deaths revealed the hot dog as a major culprit. |
| 1:02.2 | Let's listen for more. |
| 1:04.4 | Sue Baker, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 1:07.5 | Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. |
| 1:10.8 | In honor of Women's History Month, I wanted to talk to you about your illustrious career in public health, most notably your injury prevention work. |
| 1:21.1 | So when you started studying at the School of Public Health in 1966, what did injury prevention look like? |
| 1:29.8 | It was a big black. |
| 1:31.7 | I mean, it wasn't anything that anybody was paying any attention to. |
| 1:34.9 | No courses. |
| 1:36.2 | I don't remember it being even mentioned. |
| 1:39.1 | A few references for accident prevention, which over the years we changed to a focus on the injuries, the personal |
| 1:49.1 | damage that was occurring rather than trying to focus on behavior in hopes of changing the way |
| 1:56.3 | people did thing rather than changing our environments and the things that we had some possibility of |
... |
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