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, Jackson 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 Jackson went to Europe to study at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where she was psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. In Vienna Jackson 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. Jackson helped many Austrians obtain visas to the United States; her involvement with refugees continued long after she left Europe.

In 1936 Jackson returned to the United States and received a joint appointment in Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Yale Medical School while also joining the staff of the Grace-New Haven Community Hospital (later the Yale-New Haven Hospital) where she assumed direction of the psychological services for children. Increasingly she became involved with maternity and newborn services; she was particularly concerned with the impersonal approach to birth common at most hospitals, especially the separation of mother and child after delivery, and the discouragement of breast-feeding. In an effort to prevent what she felt were the harmful psychological side-effects of such practices to mother, father, and child, in 1946 she helped establish Grace-New Haven's rooming-in unit, where the child stayed with the mother and both parents learned to care for their newborn infant relatively unaffected by hospital rules and staff convenience. Along with the rooming-in plan Jackson advocated natural childbirth and breast-feeding through pre-natal instruction and concerted staff support. With other staff members Jackson wrote "Management of Breast-Feeding"; there were over 4000 requests for reprints. During the following decades Jackson's interdepartmental, multidisciplinary approach to childbirth was widely accepted and copied across the country. In New Haven, Jackson worked with other professionals to implement the interdisciplinary methods she had helped to develop. She served as psychiatric consultant to the Betsy Ross Nursery and was a member of the board of directors of the Family Service of New Haven from 1948 to 1960.

Jackson directed the Rooming-In Project between 1946 and 1953. She became clinical professor of pediatrics and psychiatry in 1949 and retired from Yale in 1959 with emeritus rank. In the same year she moved to Denver, Colorado, and was appointed visiting professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Between 1962 and 1970 she was in charge of the Rooming-in Unit at Colorado General Hospital and devoted much time to the problems of single mothers.

Jackson contributed to numerous reports and was author or co-author of more than 20 articles for medical journals, as well as others for popular magazines. She participated in numerous professional organizations and was a director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in New York City. In 1964 the American Psychiatric Association presented Jackson with the Agnes McGavin Award for her contributions to preventive psychiatry, and in 1968 she received the C. Anderson Aldrich Award in child development from the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 1973 the National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect dedicated the Jackson Family Development Center in her honor.

Jackson lived alone most of her life and never married. She died on June 5, 1977, in Denver, Colorado, at the age of 82.

From the guide to the Papers, 1907-1977, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)