Jaffa, Adele Solomons, 1868-1953

Adele Solomons was born in San Francisco on November 7, 1868, the daughter of Seixus and Hannah Marks Solomons. She received an M.D. in homeopathy from Hahnemann Medical College of the Pacific. She married Myer Edward Jaffa, who was born in Sydney, Australia in 1857 and immigrated to California with his family in the mid 1860s. Dr. Adele Solomons Jaffa was a physician, lecturer in dietetics at UC Berkeley between 1912 and 1914, and child psychiatrist (on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute of Child Welfare at UC Berkeley between 1928 and 1935). She developed the California Preschool Mental Scale. Her interest in and enthusiasm for diagnosis of emotional and psychological problems in children led her to enter private practice as the "Play Doctor" in the offices of William Palmer Lucas in San Francisco, where she remained from 1934 until her retirement in 1952. Myer E. Jaffa was an agricultural chemist, professor of nutrition at the University of California, and first director of the California Bureau of Food and Drugs. He was an early advocate of pure food and drug laws for human and domestic animal consumption, and was associated with the movement which resulted in passage of the federal food and drug laws.