Into the Fire

Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates. The Cooper's Wife is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary. New York: Basic Books, 2000. ix + 458 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-465-03087-4 (cl).

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.; ill. ISBN 0-19-512624-6 (cl); 0-19-513928-3 (pb).

Historians, like everyone else, love a sensational story. There is no shame in this. My first-grade daughter came home from school one day and explained to me that there are two kinds of reading: "reading for literary experience" and "reading to be informed." She wanted to know which I liked better. I explained that my favorite books provide both at once—they tell great stories full of new information. "No!" she said with exasperation, "which one??"

Without apology, two recent works intentionally exploit human fascination with brutality. These accounts of prominent nineteenth-century trials attract our low tabloid urges in the service of ambitious, insightful, and far-reaching social history.

Consider the packaging of Conduct Unbecoming A Woman and The Cooper's Wife is Missing, each of which brings readers back to the 1890s. Dr. Mary Amanda Dixon Jones was, according to the former book's jacket, tried for manslaughter following a Brooklyn newspaper series that depicted her as a "scalpel-eager female surgeon" whose "botched" operations required the service of "midnight hearses." Bridget Cleary was, according to the latter book's jacket, "confined, ritually starved, threatened, physically and verbally abused, exorcised, and, finally, burned to death by her husband" and other family members whose actions and subsequent trial serve to illuminate Irish history. Interested? Academic historians have returned to the story at last—and with important results. The initial, almost pornographic draw of these books challenges feminist scholars to examine the historical significance of mutilated women through the lens of their own uncomfortable engagement.

Regina Morantz-Sanchez tackles many agendas in Conduct Unbecoming A Woman. The book's engrossing cover photograph illustrates the title directly: in the blurred and sepia tones of nineteenth-century photography, eight serious women in high-necked dresses surround their matronly instructor as she dissects a cadaver at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Both the title and the image capture the work's two dominant stories. The first—a biography of the remarkable surgeon Mary Amanda Dixon Jones—frames the second, a history of medical specialization. As an enthusiastic gynecologic surgeon, Dixon Jones performed operations whose very nature seemed to challenge God's intention for women. With the onset of menses considered a girl's initiation into womanhood, hysterectomy seemed to many an assault on womanhood itself. Public sentiment about emotionally stirring medical developments was both captured and shaped by the era's newspapers, which were also undergoing rapid evolution in the 1890s. Some, like the New York Times, sought a tone of scientific objectivity, while others eagerly offered subjective accounts designed to sell papers. Morantz-Sanchez elaborates not only this newspaper history, but also the history of Brooklyn itself, making her work rich, complex, and compelling. Those expecting a simple trial drama will find themselves in much deeper water.

The book's first chapter examines a series of articles published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1889 which charged the sixty-one-year-old Dixon Jones with multiple offenses, including the execution of unnecessary and fatal operations. In these columns, the doctor was portrayed as a blade-wielding monster—a dangerous surgeon and abortionist without regard for professional ethics or human life—and a woman become madman, desexed and desexing others. She was also accused of secretive practices, financial mismanagement, and misrepresentation of her hospital as a public, not private institution. The Eagle described Dixon Jones as a savvy operator, bilking the city's wealthy philanthropists who accepted hospital propaganda at face value without any investigation of its true practices, and who believed they were supporting...