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.

Who is Mary Amanda Dixon Jones and why should we care about her? Regina Morantz-Sanchez, already well known for her work on women in medicine, leaves no doubt that around this woman swirled a great many of the cultural currents of late nineteenth-century America. In interrogating her story, Morantz-Sanchez offers a rich serving of human drama, courtroom contestation, clashing medical therapeutics, and the negotiations of class.

Mary Dixon Jones was a gynecological surgeon of some reputation living and practicing in Brooklyn. In the spring of 1889, after a series of dramatic articles in the Brooklyn Eagle accusing her of financial malfeasance and the performance of unnecessary surgery leading to the deaths of several patients, Dixon Jones was indicted for second-degree murder and manslaughter in the cases of Ida Hunt and Sarah Bates. Only the Hunt case ever came to trial, but much of the courtroom testimony was riveting: a pathetic female sufferer in the hands of a knife-happy woman physician, an ill-advised midnight carriage ride with a dying woman, an alleged cover-up of criminalbehavior. In the end, Dixon Jones was exonerated of manslaughter in the Hunt case, and as a result the prosecutor dropped the second-degree murder charge.

But this was far from the end of the affair, for Dixon Jones had (most unwisely as it turned out) brought a libel charge against the Eagle, seeking $150,000 in damages. The 1892 libel trial was much more protracted; indeed, it became something of a popular spectacle. Despite the clinically intimate nature of some of the evidence, observers reported a noticeable presence of “alert, feminine faces, eagerly stretched upward and forward” (p. 166). After more than a month of testimony the jury deliberated for some 37 hours before returning a verdict of not guilty on behalf of the newspaper. The libel trial thus substantiated the validity of the Eagle’s accusations and essentially ruined Dixon Jones’s career. She and her doctor son and partner Charles Jones departed for New York City, where she continued to remain active in pathological research and writing, but her career as a practitioner was over.

Was Dixon Jones an honorable and enterprising minister to the physical woes of her sex, or was she an unqualified, overly ambitious, and deceitful practitioner with an “uplifted knife” and “a craze to operate”? Morantz-Sanchez sees her as not quite either, although she agrees that “the evidence presented [by lawyers for the Eagle] was overwhelmingly convincing” (p. 122). In a sensitive and sophisticated analysis, Morantz-Sanchez unpacks the complexities of the Dixon Jones story in such a way that the protagonist’s guilt or innocence is almost unimportant. Most broadly, the story involves Brooklyn’s complacent self-image as a city of homes and churches and a middle-class respectability that displayed itself in supporting charitable institutions like the hospital run by Dixon Jones. As the Eagle’s lawyers asserted, “The public sentiment of the city of Brooklyn is here on trial. The kind of hospitals that we have in this city is on trial. . . . The charity of this city is on trial” (p. 171). For the city’s amour-propre, the presence of Dixon Jones was a disturbing element.

The Dixon Jones story also illuminates developments in the new medical specialty of gynecological surgery. Dixon Jones believed in resorting to surgery on the female reproductive system much more readily than conservative gynecologists thought advisable. Though many prominent gynecologists agreed with her, this “radical” practice opened her to criticism from those physicians and surgeons who thought her too eager to operate.

And then, of course, there is...