Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Carla Bittel's biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi is a major and very welcome addition to the growing literature on the history of women in American medicine. It is in many ways a counterpart to Arleen Tuchman's biography of Jacobi's somewhat older contemporary Marie Zakrezewska, published in the same UNC series. Like Zakrezewska, Jacobi renounced traditional religion in favor of science and positivism, feminism, and European socialist thought. Both women were strong-willed, avoided sentimentality, and rejected the notion that women were natural caregivers and therefore had something special to bring to medicine (at least until late in her career for Zakrezewska).

Bittel's focus, drawing on gender studies and the sociology of knowledge, is on constructions of gender and science in relation to medicine, rather than on the politics of medicine in general. Jacobi especially lends herself to this type of analysis because she alone among the traditional pioneers among women in American medicine, including the Blackwell sisters and Zakrezewska, was a prolific scientist who interacted extensively with men in medical societies and other settings. The first woman to break the barriers to entry into the Paris Ecole de Médecine, Jacobi was the best educated of her female contemporaries. Moreover, she combined her career with marriage and children. Given her importance and the relative richness of sources—she was the daughter of New York publisher George P. Putnam and was herself a literary as well as scientific author—a modern full-length biography has long been desired. Bittel does fine justice to the wealth of family correspondence from Mary Putnam's early years to detail how she rejected her early enthusiastic religious beliefs and turned, in opposition to her parents, to medicine and laboratory science, including vivisection.

Jacobi, Bittel argues persuasively, believed the pursuit of science would lead to gender equality and social improvement, and that science and social activism were deeply interrelated. Jacobi used science to counter the Victorian belief that women's bodies were inherently weak and centered on their fragile reproductive organs. She directly challenged E. H. Clarke's argument that menstruation should limit women's access to education, and S. Weir Mitchell's notorious "rest cure" for "hysterical" women. Jacobi argued that Clarke's and Mitchell's claims lacked scientific rigor. She showed by statistics and modern recording devices like the sphygmomanometer, that in either case, women would be much healthier if they were active physically and mentally. In claiming, based on her research, that women differed from men mainly by different modes of "nutrition," Jacobi attempted to depathologize women's bodies. By her own career and feminine appearance, she sought to show that science was not gendered and that a career in medicine did not "unsex" women.

A chapter is devoted to the complex issues surrounding Mary Putnam's marriage to the German Jewish emigré, Abraham Jacobi, a founder of American pediatrics as a specialty. Jacobi had previously lost two previous wives and five children that did not survive infancy. Bittel deftly details the areas in which the Jacobis agreed and the growing points of contention between them. For example, Mary privileged issues of gender inequity while Abraham saw gender as only one of several aspects of social inequality. A crisis in their marriage was precipitated by the death of their only son, Ernst, to diphtheria. The Jacobis, who treated their son, were both experts in pediatrics and yet they failed to save him. Each blamed the other. Bittel analyses the differences in their understandings of "science" in medicine, particularly the significance of bacteriology and laboratory science to medicine, as it affected their different approaches to treatment. Their daughter, Marjorie, lived to adulthood but chose a conventional marriage over her mother's example.

In later years, Bittel shows, Jacobi was active in promoting vivisection, legislation to protect female laborers, the suffrage movement, and medical women's organizations...