Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906) was a doctor who empowered women to become physicians by raising the level of medical education for women and overcoming public doubt about women’s capabilities to study and practice medicine.
Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906) was a doctor who empowered women to become physicians by raising the level of medical education for women and overcoming public doubt about women’s capabilities to study and practice medicine.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. This is Womanica.
Today, we’re talking about a woman who refused to accept gendered constraints in the medical profession. She wrote intelligently and passionately in support of women seeking to join the field, and cared deeply for her patients.
Let’s meet Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi.
In 1842, Mary was born in London, to American parents. The family returned to the states when Mary was a child, settling in New York.
Mary wanted to be a doctor from childhood – reading medical studies when she was just nine years old. Her father was a publisher, and as a teen, she wrote stories for The Atlantic Monthly and the New York Evening Post. Still, she maintained the desire to study medicine.
She first enrolled at the New York College of Pharmacy. Then in 1864, she received her MD from what was then called the Female Medical College
of Pennsylvania – later renamed to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She wrote her thesis (which was focused on the spleen) entirely in Latin – the only student to do so. But Mary was not content to just receive a medical degree.
In 1866, she traveled to Paris for further study. It took some convincing, but she became the first woman admitted to France’s École de Médicine [Ay-coal d-eh may-dee-seen], and returned to the U.S. in 1871. Just a year later, she became the first woman to become a member of the New York Academy of Medicine. And she also created the Association for the Advancement of the Medical Education of Women, and served as its president for almost 30 years.
Throughout her career, Mary served as both an educator and a physician. She lectured at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, and worked to raise the standards of education there. But despite her hard work, blazing trails, society and many of her fellow physicians, wanted to keep women out of the medical field.
In 1873, a book titled Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls was published by a Harvard professor. It claimed that women were debilitated by menstruation, which the author claimed was backed up by science. He wrote that women who participated in higher education ended up with “monstrous brains and puny bodies; abnormally active cerebration and abnormally weak digestion; flowing thought and constipated bowels.”
He claimed that all the stress and exertion of studying endangered a woman’s physical development. In a sense, make them less feminine.
As wild as that sounds now, people believed it at the time, and it hurt progress for women in academic and professional spheres.
Feminists, women, and especially women physicians, like Mary, were incensed. She refuted these claims with her own data. She argued, women could indeed work and perform at the highest level, menstruating or not.
Mary anonymously submitted an essay titled “The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation,” to Harvard’s Boylston Medical Prize in 1876. Because she submitted it without her name attached, the judges did not know it was written by a woman. In the essay, she wrote that there was “nothing in the nature of menstruation to imply the necessity, or even the desirability of rest for women whose nutrition is really normal.” Her essay won the prize.
In 1876, Mary also married her husband, Abraham Jacobi, known as the “father of American pediatrics.” Mary would go on to establish pediatric wards in hospitals, herself. She opened a small children’s ward at Mount Sinai Hospital, And she started a children’s ward at the New York Infirmary in 1886.
In the winter of 1896, Mary began experiencing the symptoms of a brain tumor. It started as a sharp pain in the back of her head that would appear and disappear throughout the day.
In the years that followed, the pain grew stronger and was accompanied by nausea, vomiting, weakness. Then, one evening, she realized she couldn’t walk. She developed a tremor in her hand, and she began to notice a change in her mind as well. She felt indifferent, detached. With a matter-of-fact style, Mary wrote a devastating account of her experience, titling it: “Description Of The Early Symptoms of the Meningeal Tumor Compressing the Cerebellum, From Which the Author Died. Written By Herself.”
Mary died in 1906, at the age of 63.
All month, we’re honoring women who changed the landscape of health and wellness.
For more information and pictures of some of the work we’re talking about, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!