Frances Stern

Frances Stern (1873–1947) was one of the first nutritionists in the United States. In 1918 she founded the Boston Dispensary Food Clinic, which evolved into what is now the Frances Stern Nutrition Center at Tufts Medical Center.

Early life and education

Frances Stern was born in Boston, the youngest of seven children of Louis Stern, a boot and shoe dealer, and Caroline (Oppenheimer) Stern, both German Jewish immigrants. After completing grammar school, she volunteered as a teacher at the Jewish Sunday School founded by Lina Frank Hecht in the North End of Boston. Around 1890 she began working at the Hebrew Industrial School for Girls, a settlement house also founded by Hecht. In 1895, Stern and her friend Isabel Hyams (or Hymans) started the Louisa May Alcott Club in the South End of Boston to teach English, cooking, and sewing to the local immigrant girls. According to her Boston Globe obituary, the club also taught shoemaking. While enrolled there, she developed what became a lifelong interest in teaching nutrition to children. She studied the work of Ellen H. Richards and went to work in Richards' lab as her assistant. While working for Richards she became a special student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she took courses in chemistry and food sanitation in 1909, 1911, and 1912.

Career

While studying at MIT, she developed visiting housekeeping programs for the Boston Association for the Relief and Control of Tuberculosis and the Boston Provident Association. From 1912 to 1915, she was an industrial health inspector for the State Board of Labor and Industries. (She may have worked with labor organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, who started working there as a factory inspector in 1914.) Through her work, she learned that many low-income and working-class people were suffering needless hardship and illness because of a lack of knowledge of proper nutrition. The clinic not only provided practical advice on food preparation for patients, but conducted research on the relationships between class and ethnicity, health and nutrition, and the effects of industrial work on health. She also taught at Tufts, MIT, Regis College, and Framingham Teachers College.

Toward the end of her life she fell ill and used a wheelchair, but continued to teach nutrition. She was skilled at presenting the material in a way that could be easily understood by non-English speakers as well as by children, and often used visual aids such as charts, wax models of food, and dishes.

She died of a heart attack at her home in Newton, Massachusetts, on December 23, 1947. She is remembered on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

Books With foreword by Lafayette Mendel.