Dr. Harriot Kezia Hunt: Nineteenth-Century Physician and Woman's Rights Advocate by Myra C. Glenn (review)

Scholarly biographies can provide critical perspectives on historical actors whose lives and circumstances can elucidate and complicate broader cultural trends. Kathryn Kish Sklar's classic study of Catharine Beecher in many ways established this as an important model for doing women's history. In this vein, Myra C. Glenn's work on Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805–1875) recovers the life of a nineteenth-century woman doctor and participant in reform movements while examining intersections of race, gender, class, religion, and histories of medicine in Massachusetts as factors that shaped Hunt's long, fascinating, and under-studied career. Hunt was a figure who was well-known in her lifetime, but like many women who practiced science or medicine in the nineteenth century, has somehow fallen out of historical consciousness.

Glenn is not the first to write about Hunt's unconventional trajectory into medicine and politics. Hunt herself wrote an autobiography entitled Glances and Glimpses: Or, Fifty Years Social, Including Twenty Years Professional Life (1856), a major primary source for the work. In addition to endnote citations, Glenn uses in-text parentheticals when referring to passages from Glances and Glimpses. This is a useful apparatus for educators assigning this monograph in undergraduate seminars; it facilitates side-by-side comparison of the works (Glances and Glimpses is digitized and freely available on the web) so that students might examine how historians use primary sources to construct arguments. Glenn, however, does much to reconstruct Hunt's life throughout, particularly the period between 1856 and 1875, which the autobiography does not address. The work incorporates heretofore unused material on Hunt as well, as Glenn was able to access a privately held diary created by Hunt's nephew.

Glenn begins by reconstructing Hunt's early social network in Boston to show how Universalism, chief among many factors, played a significant role in incubating Hunt's more radical beliefs about education and reform. The second chapter, which historians of medicine will find the most interesting, explains the beginnings of Hunt's medical practice in the 1830s, initially a collaborative venture with her sister Sarah that treated women and children from middling and working-class families. Here Glenn lays out the intellectual and cultural origins of Hunt's practice of taking "heart histories," a confessional unburdening of one's troubles; Hunt believed emotional conflict gave rise to physical affliction and thus listened and tracked her patients' woes. As Glenn points out, these heart histories "heightened [Hunt's] sensitivity to Boston's gender and class divisions" (4). Subsequent chapters illustrate Hunt's growing awareness of race, class, and gender hierarchies as she encountered personal and structural obstacles to her career, such as when she unsuccessfully petitioned to attend Harvard Medical School, and became enmeshed in reform movements for women's rights, health reform, abolition, and temperance. Although a biography and presented largely chronologically, chapters are thematic in nature. Chapters 4–6 cover different aspects of Hunt's life in the 1850s, ranging from the nature of female friendships to her advocacy for female doctors and expansion of her political networks. Chapter 7 is an analysis of Glances and Glimpses that seeks to understand how typical (or not) it was as a mid-century autobiography, as well as its contemporaneous impact and critics. Chapter 8 addresses Hunt's life after the publication of her autobiography, providing insight into how she navigated her twilight years, which, among other activities, she spent advocating for the Ladies' Physiological Institute, preaching, and championing women's suffrage. Few works have done as much to reconstruct Hunt's life in this period.

Early in the monograph, Glenn frames Hunt's life as "first woman to establish a successful medical practice in the United States" (1), which bears some commentary in case readers should find this claim to be controversial. Glenn is generous in...