The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever

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.