Mary Putnam Jacobi

American physician, educator, and writer

• Born: August 31, 1842
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: June 10, 1906
• Place of death: New York, New York

Through her personal example and work in improving medical education for women, Jacobi encouraged many women to become doctors at a time when they were not welcome in the medical profession.

Early Life

Mary Putnam Jacobi (Ja-KOH-bee) was born Mary Corinna Putnam, the oldest daughter of George Palmer Putnam, the founder of the book publishing firm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Her parents were Americans, and she was born in London while her father was there managing the European branch of his business. When Mary was five, her family returned to the United States and settled in the were chosen area.

Mary demonstrated her own literary talent by publishing a story in the June, 1860, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly before her eighteenth birthday. Determined on a scientific career, she overcame the objections of her parents and attended the New York College of Pharmacy for two years. After graduating in 1863, she obtained the reluctant consent of her father—who considered medicine a repulsive career for a woman—to enter the Female Medical College of Philadelphia. She received a medical degree after attending only one semester of lectures, but her subsequent experience as a volunteer in army camps and in a Boston hospital during the Civil War convinced her that her medical training had been woefully inadequate. In 1866, she sailed to France for further study.

Persistence won Putnam permission to attend lectures and hospital clinics in Paris, but she was denied entry to the École de Médecine, which had never admitted a woman. Only direct intervention by the minister of education forced the faculty to accept her in 1868. Putnam remained in Paris through the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the Commune. She described all these dramatic events and welcomed the birth of a new French republic in letters that she wrote home. In 1871, she passed all her examinations with high honors and graduated, while winning a bronze medal for her thesis.

Life’s Work

After returning to New York City, Putnam was immediately hired to teach at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, which had been founded by Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. She served as a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics until 1889, while setting high standards for her students. When her students complained about her demands, she in turn questioned the quality of the entering women, noting that many were inadequately prepared and had never previously faced rigorous intellectual challenges. To improve professional training of women, she organized the Association for the Advancement of the Medical Education of Women in 1872 and served as its president from 1874 to 1903.

Putnam was elected to many medical associations, beginning in November, 1871, with her election to the Medical Society of the County of New York, where her induction was presided over by Abraham Jacobi. During the following year, she married Jacobi, who had been born in 1830 of Jewish parents and had grown up in Germany, where he received his medical degree in 1851. During that same year he had been imprisoned for participating in the revolutions of 1848. Released after two years, he had fled Germany and opened a successful medical practice in New York City in 1853. He was a prolific author of books and articles on medical topics and served in leadership positions in many medical groups. He was one of the first physicians to focus on diseases of children and helped found the specialty of pediatrics in America.

Mary and her husband shared common interests in reform as well as medicine. Abraham was particularly active in civil service reform, along with Carl Schurz, his comrade in the 1848 German revolution. Mary helped establish the New York Consumers League as part of an effort to improve conditions for working women and vigorously supported the woman suffrage movement. She and her husband also assisted each other on medical publications. Mary published a popular book on infant diet in 1874, expanding upon her husband’s lectures on that topic. A charming anecdote describes Mary and Abraham returning home on the horse cars after professional meetings, absorbedly discussing the evening’s proceedings.

The marriage of two strong personalities was not without difficulties and quarrels. The greatest strain on the marriage, however, was the death from diphtheria of their only son in 1883, before his eighth birthday. Abraham, who had published a treatise on the disease three years earlier, blamed a nurse as a possible source of the child’s infection. Mary, proud of her medical skills, reproached herself over her inability to prevent her son’s death. The two grieved the rest of their lives and were never as close emotionally afterward as they had been before.

Mary lectured five times a week on therapeutics and pharmacology at the Women’s Medical College, maintained a substantial private practice, and attended at several hospitals, including Mount Sinai, where she established an outpatient pediatric clinic. From 1882 to 1885, she lectured on diseases of children at the New York Postgraduate Medical School and thereby became the first woman to teach in a male medical school. In addition, she was a prolific writer. She published more than one hundred medical articles, chapters, and books, many of which were clinical reports of her observations of hospital patients, or descriptions of the action of specific drugs. She also contributed to popular magazines and social science journals on woman suffrage and educational reform.

Mary Jacobi was particularly proud of winning the prestigious 1876 Boylston Prize for Medical Writing awarded by the Harvard Medical School. The Harvard faculty set the question for that year’s essay as: “Do women require bodily and mental rest during Menstruation, and to what extent?” The phrasing clearly solicited an answer that would support the assertion by a Harvard Medical School professor that the physical demands of the monthly cycle made the intellectual effort of higher education dangerous to the health of young women. Essays were submitted anonymously, and the judges were surprised to learn they had awarded the prize to a woman. Jacobi’s winning entry, The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation , used case studies and statistical analysis of survey data to argue that no special considerations were needed. She objected that only in reference to women were normal physiological functions labeled “pathological.”

During the winter of 1895-1896, while vacationing in Greece with her daughter, Jacobi experienced the first symptoms of a brain tumor whose effects would turn her into a helpless invalid before her death. Her last medical paper described the slow progress of the disease, which adversely affected her speech and made it hard for her to manipulate a pen. The prolific writer of the past was reduced to laboriously inscribing a few succinct sentences to communicate her thoughts to her family and to prepare her final clinical report to her profession. She finally died in New York City on June 10, 1906, in her sixty-fourth year.

Significance

Mary Jacobi was an active feminist, employing her pen in support of woman suffrage and striving to improve conditions of life for working women. She was particularly interested in increasing educational and vocational prospects for women, especially in medicine. However, she explicitly rejected the Victorian idea of a special sphere for women based on feminine virtues as too limiting. She agreed that women might be better at caring for sick people than men, but she thought that being a nurse was not good enough and that women should aspire to be doctors on an equal plane with men.

Jacobi set high standards for herself, for her students, and for women generally. She was proud of being the first woman admitted to the École de Médecine but regretted that she was unable to convince the faculty of the merits of her application and had had to depend on the intervention of a government minister to achieve her dream of earning a first-class medical degree. She was especially pleased that she had won recognition from the medical community of New York City, not merely as the foremost woman physician, but as a distinguished leader of the profession.

Mary Jacobi’s greatest contribution to feminism, and to encouraging younger women to undertake scientific careers, was simply in being who she was—a physician better trained, more scientifically active, and more successful than the overwhelming majority of her male colleagues—a living refutation of the tenacious nineteenth century myth that females were biologically and intellectually incapable of learning science and practicing medicine.

Bibliography

Harvey, Joy. “Clanging Eagles: The Marriage and Collaboration Between Two Nineteenth-Century Physicians, Mary Putnam Jacobi and Abraham Jacobi.” In Creative Couples in the Sciences, edited by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Analyzes the positive and negative aspects of Mary and Abraham Jacobi’s marriage.

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. 2d ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Examines Jacobi as a woman doctor who personified a rational, scientific approach to medicine, in contrast to women physicians who stressed the value of feminine insight and empathy.

Putnam, Ruth, ed. Life and Letters of Mary Putnam Jacobi. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925. Contains substantial selections from family letters that illustrate Jacobi’s intellectual and writing skills.

Wells, Susan. Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Studies Jacobi’s publications as an example of a woman physician who mastered the dispassionate tone in which male scientists wrote.