Champion of Women and the Unborn: Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D. (review)

Frederick N. Dyer. Champion of Women and the Unborn: Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D. Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications/USA, 1999. ix + 614 pp. Ill. $39.95.

Relying on quotes from primary sources, Frederick Dyer chronicles the life of the nineteenth-century physician H. R. Storer. The book touches on much of Storer's life but focuses on his medical career, especially his strident campaign against abortion. Dyer sets out to establish Storer as the first American gynecologist.

Storer's life is interesting. He followed his father into medicine, and into the treatment of female diseases. In Boston for the first part of his career, he studied medicine at Harvard, built a network of colleagues, and in 1866 won an appointment at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. He played a pivotal role in establishing the Gynaecological Society of Boston (in 1869) and the Journal of the Gynaecological Society of Boston (also in 1869). Visible in the medical community, he often engaged in medical controversy.

Key to Storer's felt influence in medical history is his role as creator of the American Medical Association's Committee on Criminal Abortion in 1857. His fight to criminalize abortion was well received among members of the national organization. His 1866 book, Why Not? A Book for Every Woman, argued that women should help physicians arrest the widespread practice of criminal abortion. Like many of his peers and colleagues, Storer believed that women would benefit by the criminalization of abortion because female insanity was seated in widely diverse conditions of the uterus, including abortion. Of notable significance to the historical record, he argued (along lines established by his father) that conception marked the beginning of life of the fetus.

Dyer's background as a psychologist influences the focus and presentation of Champion of Women. For the historian and researcher, Dyer's newly identified Storer documents present an entrée into the available material. Unfortunately, however, there is scant historical context provided. The book intrigues the reader with pieces of several episodes in Storer's life, but little analysis. Apparently Storer's first wife, Emily Elvira, for years suffered from menstrual disorders that led to her breakdown and institutionalization, and eventual death. This is a story that needs to be developed if we are to understand Storer himself.

Material concerning women as patients, physicians, or reformers is not in evidence. While he argued against women practicing medicine, he nevertheless worked with them: Dr. Anita Tyng was his assistant, and he served as the only male surgeon in Dr. Marie Zakrezewska's hospital in Boston (the New England Hospital for Women and Children). Storer met with a fair degree of success in the AMA, but he was persona non grata in Boston in several instances: he left the New England Hospital for Women and Children under fire, and lost a position at Harvard Medical School.

Today, Storer's ties with the original American campaign to outlaw abortion color our interpretation of his medical career. In the nineteenth century he also met with conflicting sentiments. An ambivalent reception by his peers and the public kept him from being powerful enough to claim establishment of the profession of gynecology. His competitors--J. Marion Sims, T. A. Emmet, and others of the Woman's Hospital--cloaked their work and opinions regarding abortion by professing to treat the so-called accidents of childbirth.

While not establishing Storer as the first gynecologist, this book serves as a worthy research volume to further scholars' interpretations of nineteenth-century medicine.

Deborah Kuhn McGregor
University of Illinois at Springfield

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