When she was ten days old, her mother was paralyzed from a stroke and died seventeen months later. Because bottle feeding was then unknown, Davis had to be fed with an eye-dropper, and later felt her interest in nutrition was due to the deprivation of oral feeding during her infancy. Early in her career she treated every patient as if they were herself. "Every patient was me, and I was mother, trying to get him healthy. I spent all my time making up for the mother I didn't have."