Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn (review)

Regina Morantz-Sanchez. Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xi + 292 pp. $30.00.

This is a first-rate book. It pivots, rather like a kaleidoscope, around two sensational trials involving the Brooklyn-based gynecologic surgeon Mary Dixon Jones. In the first trial, which took place in 1890, Dixon Jones was exonerated on charges of manslaughter brought by the district attorney after some of her patients died. In the second trial, which took place in 1892 and became the longest libel suit tried in the United States to that time, Dixon Jones failed to win a judgment against the newspaper whose public attacks had pushed the district attorney to indict her in the first place.

Regina Morantz-Sanchez has constructed her historical kaleidoscope with great skill and literary efficiency; its artistic and colorful facets help illustrate a host of subjects that interest medical historians. At a minimum, those subjects include the training and everyday behavior of physicians, the often uneasy attitude of physicians toward one another, the various routes to professional acclaim, the relationship between physicians and their patients, the emergence of gynecologic surgery and pathology, the role of the press in maintaining ethical standards in medicine, the impact of gender on late-nineteenth-century medical thinking, the function of expert medical testimony, and the place of physicians in the rapidly emerging upper-middle classes of Victorian America.

Dixon Jones herself comes off as a canny self-promoter, who was quick to operate but anxious to find scientific justifications for what she did. Though technically proficient, she was financially disingenuous, even with her supporters, in addition to being personally imperious and professionally aggressive. By today's standards she would probably be regarded as marginally out of control, but in an era when malpractice was even more ambiguous than it is at the present time, when the concept of informed consent had yet to be formulated, and when few people--men or women--were willing to push for radical solutions to female health problems, Dixon Jones's actions are far harder to assess. In re-creating that time period and letting her readers make the call for themselves, Morantz-Sanchez has produced a terrific vignette full of intriguing reverberations.

One of the factors behind the effectiveness of this book is a full ten years of research on the part of a historian who already knew a great deal about the field to begin with. The results show. The treatment of gender-and-medicine in this book, for example, a subject on which Morantz-Sanchez has published before, is subtle, complex, and deeply contextualized--a delight to read. The same may be said about her ability to balance international trends in Western medicine at the end of the nineteenth century with the socio-professional and personal realities of actual practice in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Morantz-Sanchez's two chapters on gynecology contain all the information I would want my students to understand about that specialty in the 1890s, but I suspect they will have a lot more fun getting it in this fashion than getting it from a textbook. In short, this is a rich, mature monograph full of substance.

Conduct Unbecoming a Woman demonstrates convincingly the great promise of what was announced more than thirty years ago as the social history of medicine. No one can come away from this well-crafted study without renewed appreciation of how intricately intertwined are medical history and every other kind of history.

James C. Mohr
University of Oregon

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