Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America
In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and that women physicians endangered the profession. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a physician from New York, worked to prove them wrong and argued that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health.

Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America is the first full-length biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. Jacobi rose to national prominence in the 1870s and went on to practice medicine, teach, and conduct research for over three decades. She campaigned for co-education, professional opportunities, labor reform, and suffrage--the most important women's rights issues of her day. Downplaying gender differences, she used the laboratory to prove that women were biologically capable of working, learning, and voting. Science, she believed, held the key to promoting and producing gender equality.

Carla Bittel's biography of Jacobi offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on continuing debates about gender and science today.
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Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America
In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and that women physicians endangered the profession. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a physician from New York, worked to prove them wrong and argued that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health.

Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America is the first full-length biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. Jacobi rose to national prominence in the 1870s and went on to practice medicine, teach, and conduct research for over three decades. She campaigned for co-education, professional opportunities, labor reform, and suffrage--the most important women's rights issues of her day. Downplaying gender differences, she used the laboratory to prove that women were biologically capable of working, learning, and voting. Science, she believed, held the key to promoting and producing gender equality.

Carla Bittel's biography of Jacobi offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on continuing debates about gender and science today.
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Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America

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

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

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

by Carla Bittel

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Overview

In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and that women physicians endangered the profession. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a physician from New York, worked to prove them wrong and argued that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health.

Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America is the first full-length biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. Jacobi rose to national prominence in the 1870s and went on to practice medicine, teach, and conduct research for over three decades. She campaigned for co-education, professional opportunities, labor reform, and suffrage--the most important women's rights issues of her day. Downplaying gender differences, she used the laboratory to prove that women were biologically capable of working, learning, and voting. Science, she believed, held the key to promoting and producing gender equality.

Carla Bittel's biography of Jacobi offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on continuing debates about gender and science today.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469606446
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 06/01/2012
Series: Studies in Social Medicine
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 352
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Carla Bittel is associate professor of history at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

At long last, a biography that captures Mary Putnam Jacobi in all her complexity! Jacobi's extraordinary intelligence and keen analytic mind informed her transgressive unconventionality in myriad ways, making her a role model for today's young people who are not satisfied with the world as it is. Carla Bittel's book serves scholarship, history, and all readers determined to follow their own path. Bravo!—Regina Morantz-Sanchez, University of Michigan

This is a first-rate study of one of the most important American nineteenth-century medical scientists of either sex, one who tackled an amazing variety of issues concerning gender and who wrote about most of them in an extremely prescient way. A gripping intellectual biography.—Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College

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