Abraham Jacobi (6 May 1830 – 10 July 1919) was a German physician and pioneer of pediatrics. He was a key figure in the movement to improve child healthcare and welfare in the United States and opened the first children's clinic in the country. To date, he is the only foreign-born president of the American Medical Association. He helped found the American Journal of Obstetrics. He is regarded as the Father of American Pediatrics. Biography Born in Hartum (now a district of Hille), Westphalia, he was the son of a poor Jewish shopkeeper and his wife, who educated him at great sacrifice. He attended the gymnasium in Minden. After graduating there, he studied medicine at the universities of Greifswald, Göttingen, and Bonn, receiving an MD at Bonn in 1851. Shortly thereafter, Jacobi joined the revolutionary movement in Germany (see Revolution of 1848). He was detained in prisons at Berlin and Cologne in 1851, where he was acquitted as defendant in the Cologne Communist Trial in 1852. Later he was imprisoned at Bielefeld and Minden, where he was convicted of lese Majeste in 1853. Upon release, Jacobi sailed to England, where he stayed with both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In the following autumn he moved to New York where he settled as a practicing physician. He soon became a key figure in the movement to improve child healthcare and welfare in the United States. He remained in contact with Marx and Engels and in 1857 Jacobi was involved in founding the New York Communist Club. Starting in 1861 at New York Medical College, he was a professor of childhood diseases. From 1867 to 1870, he was chair of the medical department of the City University of New York. He taught at Columbia University for 30+ years from 1870 to 1902. He later moved to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he established the first Department of Pediatrics at a general hospital. He was president of the New York Pathological and Obstetrical Societies, and twice of the Medical Society of the County of New York, visiting physician to the German Hospital beginning 1857, to Mount Sinai Hospital beginning 1860, to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and the infant hospital on Randall's Island beginning 1868, and to Bellevue Hospital beginning 1874. In 1882 he was president of the New York State Medical Society, and in 1885 became president of the New York Academy of Medicine.