Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America

Carla Bittel's biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi is a major and very welcome addition to the growing literature on the history of women in American medicine. It is in many ways a counterpart to Arleen Tuchman's biography of Jacobi's somewhat older contemporary Marie Zakrezewska, published in the same UNC series. Like Zakrezewska, Jacobi renounced traditional religion in favor of science and positivism, feminism, and European socialist thought. Both women were strong-willed, avoided sentimentality, and rejected the notion that women were natural caregivers and therefore had something special to bring to medicine (at least until late in her career for Zakrezewska). Bittel's focus, drawing on gender studies and the sociology of knowledge, is on constructions of gender and science in relation to medicine, rather than on the politics of medicine in general. Jacobi especially lends herself to this type of analysis because she alone among the traditional pioneers among women in American medicine, including the Blackwell sisters and Zakrezewska, was a prolific scientist who interacted extensively with men in medical societies and other settings. The first woman to break the barriers to entry into the Paris Ecole de Médecine, Jacobi was the best educated of her female contemporaries. Moreover, she combined her career with marriage and children. Given her importance and the relative richness of sources—she was the daughter of New York publisher George P. Putnam and was herself a literary as well as scientific author—a modern full-length biography has long been desired. Bittel does fine justice to the wealth of family correspondence from Mary Putnam's early years to detail how she rejected her early enthusiastic religious beliefs and turned, in opposition to her parents, to medicine and laboratory science, including vivisection.

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