Science Has No Sex: The Life of Marie Zakrzewska, M.D. (review)

In her cleanly written new biography of Marie Zakrzewska (1829–1902), Arleen Marcia Tuchman emphasizes the difficulty of categorizing the audacious founder of the New England Hospital for Women and Children. In her fight for female medical education, Zakrzewska (pronounced "Zak-chef-ska") refused to deploy the arguments most favored by her contemporaries—that women brought special, gender-specific qualities to the practice of medicine, or that modest female patients deserved the option of female practitioners. Instead, she argued that "science has no sex." Women, she believed, should become physicians for the same reason as men: because they chose to.

Zakrzewska grew up in Germany, the oldest of five children and the daughter of upwardly mobile but financially struggling parents. She credited her father, a civil servant, with introducing her to antiauthoritarian politics, but his purported radicalism was not reflected in his career of reliable service to the king. Her mother, a professional midwife, not only introduced Marie to medical work but also championed the importance of formal credentialing from legitimate, accrediting institutions. This influence weighed heavily on Marie, who throughout her life rejected any alliance with alternative practitioners.

Following her mother's lead, Marie trained in midwifery at one of Europe's finest schools, under the mentorship of Joseph Hermann Schmidt. After rising to the rank of head midwife, she resolved to pursue formal medical education in the United States. She came to New York in 1853, fortuitously met Elizabeth Blackwell, and found herself quickly embraced by a community of social reformers who supported her education and professional ambitions for decades to come. Zakrzewska graduated from Cleveland Medical College in 1856, during the school's brief experiment with coeducation. She thus was one of very few women of the time to be trained at an orthodox, male-dominated medical school.

With the encouragement and financial backing of people like Dr. Walter Channing, Lucy Goddard, Mary Jane Parkman, Abby May, and Ednah Dow Cheney, Zakrzewska and the Blackwell sisters founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857. From there, Zakrzewska went on to spend three years directing the clinical department of the New England Female Medical College in Boston, before setting off to found the historic New England Hospital for Women and Children, where she spent the rest of her career.

Tuchman details each of these unusual institutions through the lens of Zakrzew-ska's overriding goals: the rigorous clinical training of women physicians, and the promotion of an equitable society devoid of arbitrary authority. The atheist Zakrzewska valued science as a democratizing force, accessible to all people, and as the key to both her missions. Though never a scientific researcher, and ultimately wary of the dominating influence that laboratory science brought to medical training in the 1890s, she steadily defended scientific thinking. Tuchman argues that her subject rejected efforts to distinguish a female world of morality, religion, sympathy, and service from a male world of science, rationality, politics, and accomplishment. To Zakrzewska, science was the only moral faith, in essence a political philosophy, to be equally pursued by both sexes.

Unfortunately, Zakrzewska published very little. She kept no diary, and few of her personal letters remain. She never married and lived all of her adult life as the primary breadwinner in a lively, coed house of married and unmarried social reformers. Direct quotes reveal her to have been a forthright and compelling advocate, strong, sometimes inflexible and nasty to her critics, but loyal and loving to her friends and mentors.

Tuchman treats her sources with appropriate speculation and dexterity. When compared with studies of radical alternative practitioners, this book is remarkable for demonstrating the ways in which people from oppositional starting points and contradictory rigidities can evolve to defend the same sound preventive medicine, good hygiene, and cautious intervention. The history of...