Jackson, Edith Banfield, 1895-1977

Edith Banfield Jackson, pediatrician and child psychiatrist, was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on January 2, 1895, the daughter of William and Helen Fiske (Banfield) Jackson. She was graduated from Vassar College in 1916 and in 1921 received her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

Following internships in internal medicine at the State University of Iowa Hospital and in pediatrics at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, EBJ went to work at the U.S. Children's Bureau and collaborated with Martha May Eliot and others on the New Haven Rickets study at Yale University. In 1930 EBJ went to Europe to study at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where she was psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. In Vienna EBJ was able to combine her interests in pediatrics and psychiatry by helping Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud establish an experimental, all-day nursery school, where the psychiatric conditions of very young children were observed and treated. EBJ helped many Austrians obtain visas to the United States; her involvement with refugees continued long after she left Europe (see #6-8).

...