Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
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Jacobi, Mary Putnam
(1842-1906), physician, women's rights advocate, and medical educator. Of all the women physicians who achieved distinction in the nineteenth century, Jacobi was easily the most highly respected by her male colleagues. Indeed, her professional achievements were equaled by few of either sex. Her family supported her in her career decision in spite of their reservations about the field. Her father, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, considered medical science to be a "repulsive pursuit" but nevertheless took great pride in Mary's success. He begged only that she shun the company of "strong-minded women." "Be a lady from the dotting of your i's to the color of your ribbons," he wrote to her in 1863, "and if you must be a doctor and a philosopher, be an attractive and agreeable one."
Jacobi, who appreciated her parents' remarkable tolerance of her plans, spent many long years pursuing her goals. After receiving a degree in 1863 from the New York College of Pharmacy, she attended the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, graduating a year later. She then studied clinical medicine at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Dissatisfied with the level of training in the United States, she left for France, where after much perseverance, she was admitted to the Ecole de Médecine. She received her degree in 1871 (only the second woman to do so) and was awarded high honors and a bronze medal for her thesis.
Jacobi vacillated between research and clinical medicine before she returned to New York in 1871. She set up a practice and joined the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary as professor of therapeutics and materia medica. Although she considered New York medicine inferior to that in Paris, Jacobi continued to develop as a first-rate physician and scientist. She was the first woman to be admitted to the New York Academy of Medicine and later chaired its section on neurology. She gained admission to numerous other medical societies as well and nurtured her sustained interest in research by publishing 9 books and over 120 medical articles. One of the books, The Questions of Rest for Women during Menstruation, won Harvard's esteemed Boylston Prize in 1876 in spite of its culturally charged subject.
In 1873 she married Dr. Abraham Jacobi, a German refugee who had already made a profound impact on New York medicine and is considered to be the father of the specialty of pediatrics. They formed a lively and stimulating intellectual and professional partnership.
A male member of the Pathological Society remembered Jacobi as a woman "whose knowledge of pathology was so thorough, whose range of the literature was so wide and whose criticism was so keen, fearless and just that in our discussions, we felt it prudent to shun the field of speculation to walk strictly in the path of demonstrated fact." She was especially supportive of women students, believing that high standards and rigorous training were essential if they were to find a place in the profession. Her status in the male professional world never deterred her from participating in the women's medical movement, and she remained active with the New York Infirmary and the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in several capacities. One of her last scientific works was a detailed and remarkably insightful clinical account of the onset and progress of the meningeal tumor that led to her death in 1906.
Bibliography:
Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (1985); Rhoda Truax, The Doctors Jacobi (1952).
Author:
Regina Morantz-Sanchez
See also Feminist Movement; Medicine.
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Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
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| Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi | |
|---|---|
 Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi |
|
| Born | August 31, 1842 London, UK |
| Died | June 10, 1906 New York city |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | medicine |
| Institutions | Faculté de Médecine de Paris |
Mary Corinna Putnam (August 31, 1842 – June 10, 1906) was an American physician, writer, and suffragist who was the first woman admitted to the Faculté de Médecine de Paris.
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Contents
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Biography
The daughter of George Palmer Putnam and Victorine Haven Putnam, she was born in London, where her father had been living since 1841 while establishing a branch office for his New York City publishing company, Wiley & Putnam. She was the oldest of eleven children.
Mary Putnam's parents returned to the United States in 1848, and she spent her childhood and adolescence in New York City. She got most of her early education at home along with two years at a new public school for girls on 12th Street where she graduated in 1859. She published a story, "Found and Lost," in the April 1860 issue of Atlantic Monthly, and a year later she published another. After her 1859 graduation, she studied Greek, and science, and medicine privately with Elizabeth Blackwell and others. Her father thought medicine a "repulsive" profession, but ultimately supported her endeavor.
She graduated from the New York College of Pharmacy in 1863 and earned her M.D. from the Female (later Women's) Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1864. A short internship at New England Hospital for Women and Children showed her she needed further study before practicing medicine. She left for Paris, France where she applied to the École de Médecine of the University of Paris. After much negotiation, she was admitted as the first woman student. She graduated in July 1871, the second woman to get a degree there, and received second prize for her thesis.
Her studies in Paris coincided with the Franco-Prussian War. In Scribner's Monthly of August 1871, she published an account of the new French political leadership that came to power following the war.
After returning to the United States in the fall of 1871, she established a medical practice in New York City, became the second woman member of the Medical Society of the County of New York, was admitted to the American Medical Association, and became a professor in the new Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. In 1872 she organized the Association for the Advancement of the Medical Education of Women and served as its president from 1874 to 1903. Her teaching at the Medical College tended to exceed what her students were prepared for and led her to resign in 1888.
She received Harvard University's Boylston Prize in 1876 for an original essay, The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation. In 1891 she contributed a paper on the history of women physicians in the United States to the volume Women's Work in America that included a bibliography of writings by American female physicians that mentioned over forty of her own works.
In 1873, Mary Putnam married Dr. Abraham Jacobi who is often referred to as the "father of American pediatrics." They had three children, though only one survived to adulthood, Marjorie Jacobi McAneny. She educated her daughter herself according to her own educational theories.
She wrote more than 100 medical papers. She stopped writing fiction in 1871.
She died in New York city in 1906, considered an outstanding physician and the foremost female physician of her era.
Notes
Works
- De la graisse neutre et de les acides gras (Paris thesis, 1871)
- The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation (1876)
- Acute Fatty Degeneration of New Born (1878)
- The Value of Life (New York, 1879)
- Cold Pack and Anæmia (1880)
- The Prophylaxis of Insanity (1881)
- "Studies in Endometritis" in the American Journal of Obstetrics (1885)
- Articles on "Infantile Paralysis" and "Pseudo-Muscular Hypertrophy" in Pepper's Archives of Medicine (1888)
- Hysteria, and other Essays (1888)
- Physiological Notes on Primary Education and the Study of Language (1889)
- "Common Sense" Applied to Woman Suffrage (1894) This expanded on an address she made that same year before a constitutional convention in Albany. It was reprinted in 1915 and contributed to the final successful push for women's suffrage.
- From Massachusetts to Turkey (1896)
Sources
- Bittel, Carla Jean (2005). "Science, suffrage, and experimentation: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the controversy over vivisection in late nineteenth-century America". Bulletin of the history of medicine 79 (4): 664–94. doi:10.1353/bhm.2005.0138. PMID 16327083.
- Gartner, C B (May 1996). "Fussell's folly: academic standards and the case of Mary Putnam Jacobi". Academic Medicine 71 (5): 470–7. doi:10.1097/00001888-199605000-00016. PMID 9125974.
- Harvey, J (1994). "La Visite: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Paris Medical Clinics". Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands) 25: 350–71. PMID 7517812.
- Ross, M M (1992). "Women's struggles to enter medicine: two nineteenth-century women physicians in America". The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha-Honor Medical Society. Alpha Omega Alpha 55 (1): 33–6. PMID 1565681.
- Farley, F (1984). "Two generations of women physicians: the New York Infirmary, 1870–1899". Journal of the American Medical Women's Association (1972) 39 (6): 189–91. PMID 6392396.
- Davis, P J (November 1965). "Mary Putnam Jacobi". New England Journal of Medicine 273 (19): 1037–1038. PMID 5320889.
- La graisse neutre et des acides gras. Thesis (Doctorate en Médecine)--Faculté de médecine de Paris, 1871.
"Jacobi, Abraham". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1892.- "Jacobi, Mary Putnam". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
- "Jacobi, Mary Putnam". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
- Mary Bronson Hartt (1932). "Jacobi, Mary Corinna Putnam". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
- Carol B. Gartner (1999). "Jacobi, Mary Corinna Putnam". American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press.
External links
- Mary Putnam Jacobi Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
- Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America's Women Physicians - Dr. Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi. A project of the United States National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.
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The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
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