Dr. S. Josephine Baker (1873-1945), Director of the Bureau of Child Hygiene of the New York City Department of Health from 1908 until 1923, described what must have been one of the most unusual riots in the history of American pediatrics.
I first heard of it when I got a ‘phone call that there was serious trouble at one of the public schools on the lower east side and went down to investigate. The school yard was clogged with a mob of six or seven hundred Jewish and Italian mothers wailing and screaming in a fine frenzy and apparently just on the point of storming the doors and wrecking the place. Every few minutes their hysteria would be whipped higher by the sight of a child ejected from the premises bleeding from mouth and nose and screaming with sheer panic. In view of what I saw when I had fought my way inside, I would not have blamed the mothers if they had burned the place down. For the doctors had coolly descended on the school, taken possession, lined the children up, marched them past, taken one look down each child's throat, and then two strong arms seized and held the child while the doctor used his instruments to reach down into the throat and rip out whatever came nearest to hand, leaving the boy or girl frightened out of a year's growth and bleeding savagely. No attempt at psychological preparation, no explanation to the child or warning to the parents.
Methods and Results of Testing School Children. Manual of Tests Used by the Psychological Survey in the Public Schools of New York City, Including Social and Physical Studies of the Children Tested. Evelyn Dewey , Emily Child , Beardsley Ruml