Adelaide Brown: An Online Exhibit of a Stanford Medicine Pioneer

Image courtesy of the Stanford Medical History Center

Adelaide Brown MD
Image courtesy of the Stanford Medical History Center

This 1924 bulletin of the Milk Commission in San Francisco addressed a Bay Area foot and mouth disease epidemic, and reflected policy efforts by public health advocates like Adelaide Brown to ensure milk safety
Image courtesy of the Stanford Medical History Center

This map illustrated a report to the Palo Alto Board of Health about a 1902 typhoid outbreak in Stanford and Palo Alto, and reflected many Californians’ anxieties over milk safety
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Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review began publication in 1917 while Sanger was in jail for providing contraception to women in New York City. Sanger later founded the American Birth Control League, which took over her editorship of the Review in 1928 and which changed its name in 1942 to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Image courtesy of the Stanford Medical History Center

In this 1935 correspondence, Margaret Sanger spurs Adelaide Brown’s efforts in California to lobby for birth control legislation at the national level.
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This 1934 fundraising letter for the Maternal Health Clinic conveys a record of their work, while also alluding to the Great Depression’s impact on women’s ability to seek medical attention
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Margaret Sanger
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

Cover art from an early edition of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color

David Starr Jordan served as the founding President of Stanford University, 1891-1913. He also championed eugenics, including the publication of such works as his 1901 The Blood of the Nation: A Study in the Decay of Races by the Survival of the Unfit.
Image courtesy of the Stanford Special Collections and University Archives

Adelaide Brown’s 1925 article on pioneering women physicians in California
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Photograph of Charlotte Blake Brown, the mother of Adelaide Brown, which Adelaide Brown included in her 1925 article on the history of women in California medicine
Image courtesy of the Stanford Medical History Center