The Cure for Women

October 25, 2024

Reeder (author of the LJ-starred Dust Bowl Girls) writes a history of the pioneering Mary Putnam Jacobi. This daughter of publisher George Palmer Putnam attended the Sorbonne medical school and conducted groundbreaking research in women's health, smashing the patriarchy and confronting sexism in medicine and its Victorian-era prejudices. Prepub Alert.

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November 15, 2024
A pioneering American female doctor gets her due. Written with a somewhat novelistic flair, this is a fascinating, detailed biography of the gifted, impetuous social reformer and trailblazer for women's medical education, Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a doctor at a time when male doctors believed that women shouldn't even study medicine. Reeder first discusses a few of the key women doctors in America. In 1860, Jacobi was 17 when she started working at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, eventually graduating from the New York College of Pharmacy. At the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, she wrote her thesis in Latin. Her first job was an exhausting internship at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, followed by work in a private lab. In 1866 she went to Paris, interned at hospitals, and conducted scientific research, which she excelled at. After numerous attempts, she was finally accepted at the prestigious �cole de M�decine. "Her research and education," Reeder writes, "made her one of the best educated doctors in America." Next Jacobi became a professor at the women-run Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, updated its curriculum, and was accepted into many prestigious associations, all while finding time to do some private practice out of her home. In 1873 she married a doctor, Abraham Jacobi. On their honeymoon, she updated his book, Infant Diet, for women readers. Her writing on menstruation won the prestigious Boylston Medical Prize; she later published it as a book. Reeder discusses Putnam's "tremendous capacity for work," her many articles and books, including fiction, and her relentless fight for suffrage and women's rights in medicine and labor reform. Despite occasional lengthy digressions that slow down the narrative, this is an impressive, important biography. A much-needed biography of an extraordinary woman.

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Starred review from October 14, 2024
Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906), the second woman to graduate from the Sorbonne medical school, played a forgotten but critical role in feminist history, according to this brilliant account. Reeder (Dust Bowl Girls) describes how over the course of the 19th century, women excluded from male-only universities were increasingly able to enter the medical profession via newly established women’s colleges, leading to a misogynist backlash from the male-dominated field. Drawing on pseudoscience and eugenics, male doctors gave speeches and published popular tracts on how women were naturally sickly due to their menstrual cycles, and thus should never be entrusted with important roles like the practice of medicine. Jacobi, a talented physician and fiery advocate for women’s advancement, came up with the idea of conducting the first-ever scientific, data-backed study of women’s reproductive biology, enlisting other women she met through her suffragist activism to help. The 1874 study, which was the first to use a questionnaire to gather health-related data, resulted in groundbreaking discoveries—including that a woman’s body temperature fluctuates throughout her menstrual cycle—while definitively disproving that there is any change to a woman’s physical strength associated with menstruation. Reeder’s winsomely written narrative touches on issues strikingly similar to ones widely discussed today, including women’s ongoing frustration with the lack of robust medical study of the female body and the troubling reemergence of reactionary assertions that women are by design not fit for work. It’s an urgent and revealing slice of history. (Dec.)
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that Jacobi was the first woman to graduate from the Sorbonne medical school.