Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906)

Mary Putnam Jacobi was a physician and researcher in the United States whose work advanced the understanding of women’s health in the late nineteenth century. She held senior positions at institutions such as the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, both located in New York City, New York. At a time when women faced substantial barriers in both healthcare and academia, Jacobi conducted scientific research that challenged widely held misconceptions about women’s physiology, particularly regarding menstruation. By performing laboratory experiments and advocating for vivisection, which is the practice of performing operations on live animals for research purposes, Jacobi played a role in advancing medical techniques that influenced future research. Jacobi’s work not only contributed to a more scientific understanding of women’s biology but also led to greater inclusion of women in medical research and practice.

Early Life and Education

Jacobi was born on 31 August 1842, in London, England, to Victorine Haven Putnam and George Palmer Putnam, the founder of the publishing firm G. P. Putnam’s Sons. She was the eldest of eleven children. Though her parents were living in London at the time of her birth, they were originally from the United States. The family returned to the US in 1848, and Jacobi spent her childhood in Staten Island, Yonkers, and Morrisania, all in the state of New York. During Jacobi’s early years, her mother educated her at home, and later Jacobi attended a private school in Yonkers. At the age of fifteen, she attended the first public high school for girls in New York City.

While in high school, Jacobi’s writing, specifically her fiction, began receiving attention from magazine editors. In April 1860, Jacobi published her first story, “Found and Lost,” in The Atlantic Monthly for which she earned eighty dollars. The story is about a German scientist who finds the source of the Nile River in Egypt only to have that discovery jeopardized by an ambitious American entrepreneur. Then in 1861, The Atlantic Monthly published another one of her works entitled “Hair Chains,” which explores themes of extending scientific education to women. Jacobi’s interest in writing fiction continued for the rest of her life, but she did not make it her primary focus. According to Carla Bittel, an associate professor of history at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, Jacobi saw a great deal of loss and suffering during the US Civil War, which influenced her decision to explore healthcare professions. Jacobi’s father was reluctantly supportive of her involvement in what he called the inherently repulsive pursuit of medical science, and he insisted that she should preserve her feminine character.

Jacobi’s formal medical education began at the New York College of Pharmacy in New York City in the early 1860s, and she also took private science courses on the side. Even as Jacobi had been pursuing her medical education, her family pressured her to return home and, as the eldest daughter, assist her mother with domestic duties. She accepted those responsibilities for a time but eventually returned to the medical institution and graduated in 1863. She was the first woman to graduate from the New York College of Pharmacy.

She then continued her studies at the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, renamed the Woman’s College of Pennsylvania as of 1867, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she earned her medical degree in 1864, making her among the first women to graduate from medical school at a time when women were largely excluded from the medical profession. Afterward, she interned for a short time at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, Massachusetts. According to letters she wrote to her mother, Jacobi desired to obtain further education to a level unfeasible in the nineteenth-century United States. As a result, in 1866, she moved to Paris, France, after becoming the first woman accepted to the École de Médecine (School of Medicine) there, which was the main campus of the Faculté de Médecine (Faculty of Medicine).

Between 1866 and 1871, while in Paris, Jacobi trained in both clinical and scientific approaches to medicine. At the École de Médecine, she was under the mentorship of figures such as André-Victor Cornil, who studied bacteria, and Louis-Antoine Ranvier, who reported on the nodes of Ranvier, which help with neuron communication. Jacobi studied histology, or the study of tissues and cells, and cellular pathology, the study of diseases at the level of cells. At École de Médecine, she wrote a thesis, which focused on the chemical processes that occur in the liver and how the development of fat within cells could interfere with proper metabolic functions or nutrient absorption. According to the weekly journal Medical Record, on 15 September 1871, an unnamed Paris newspaper reported that the President of the Board of Examiners of the École de Médecine read Jacobi’s thesis aloud to a large lecture room. He deemed the thesis deserving of the highest mark, extrêmement satisfait (exceptionally satisfactory), which was rarely awarded to a thesis. Additionally, Putnam received the highest mark for each of her five examinations required to graduate. In a memorial speech for Jacobi in 1907, given by William Osler, a physician who helped create the field of internal medicine, he stated that Jacobi’s medical degree from the École de Médecine and her training in scientific medicine were unusual at that time even among men.

During her time in Paris, Jacobi lived through the Franco-Prussian War, a conflict between the Second French Empire of Napoleon III and the Kingdom of Prussia, and she extended her stay to work in hospitals. From October 1869 until her departure back to the United States in 1871, she resided with the Réclus family, who were advocates of socialism, political reform, and women’s rights. Socialism is an economic and political system with the goal of collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. According to Bittel, Jacobi adopted socialist principles and heavily supported establishing a republic in the French empire. A republic is a representational form of government in which a majority of citizens elect their leaders for a specified period of time.

While living with the Réclus family, Jacobi learned to bring together her political and scientific views under the mentorship of Élisée Réclus. Réclus was a researcher in geography, the study of places and their relationships to people, and a supporter of anarchy, a state of society in which a hierarchical government is absent. According to Bittel, Jacobi also aligned herself with the Comtean positivist way of thinking. Auguste Comte studied philosophy and science in France during the mid-nineteenth century and helped name and methodically organize the field of sociology, which is the study of human interactions and how societies change. According to Bittel, influenced by Comte’s combining of philosophy of science and political philosophy, Jacobi came to believe that observations of physical and social entities should serve as the foundation of knowledge. Bittel also states Jacobi came to believe that an emphasis on human concerns should take the place of organized religion in society and that science provides effective means for social reform.

Medical Career

In 1871, after her time in Paris, Jacobi returned to New York, where she immediately became immersed in the medical sphere by opening a private practice. She also became involved in medical societies in New York, including the founding of the Association for the Advancement of the Medical Education of Women in 1872. In 1871, she became the first woman in the United States to present a medical paper, titled “Women in Medicine,” to a medical society, the Medical Library and Journal Association. She also secured a job at the New York Infirmary in New York City as a practicing physician, one of only four hospitals in the country that allowed women in that role. In addition, she also became a professor of materia medica (medical materials) and therapeutics at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary from 1873 to 1889. Materia medica is the branch of medicine dealing with materials and substances used in the preparation of medicinal drugs, and therapeutics is the branch of medicine dealing with treatments and cures of diseases. During her time at the institution, Jacobi changed the curriculum by separating the study of the chemical properties of drugs, or the science of pharmaceuticals, from the study of therapeutic physiology into two distinct courses. Jacobi characterized her daily routine of running a private practice, working at the New York Infirmary, and teaching at its Woman’s Medical College as a busy day.

In 1873, after securing authorization from Mount Sinai Hospital, Jacobi and Anne A. Angel, a physician who graduated from the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, began giving medical care to children brought to the medical facility. According to the Women’s Medical Association of New York City, Jacobi founded the pediatric dispensary service at the hospital. A dispensary provides free medical treatment and advice to patients who are both sick and poor rather than to the general public. Jacobi continued to attend to the children at the hospital until 1886, when she also opened a small ward for children in the hospital. Jacobi continued to serve variously as a visiting, attending, and consulting physician at the New York Infirmary through 1897.

Also in 1873, Jacobi married Abraham Jacobi, a physician working in New York City who helped create the field of pediatrics and who also was the President of the Medical Society of the County of New York, to which Jacobi obtained membership. They had three children, but only one, Marjorie Jacobi McAneny, survived to adulthood.

Work in Menstruation 

In the 1870s, Jacobi became an outspoken advocate against the perpetuation of false information regarding women’s health. In particular, she targeted the conclusions of Edward H. Clarke, a physician and a professor of materia medica at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician and medical researcher, both of whom argued that women required rest during menstruation to conserve or restore bodily energies. While acknowledging that the medical community considered their opinions authoritative, Jacobi criticized their tendencies to generalize about women’s natures.

According to Cynthia J. Davis, a professor of English language and literature at the University of South Carolina, women’s rights advocates, including Jacobi, considered Clarke’s conclusions wrong, harmful, and an attempt to support a view of separate gender-based spheres of activity for men and women. The ideology of separate spheres assigned men public roles and women private roles, even though the boundary between those spheres was breaking down in the nineteenth century. Among Jacobi and other advocates’ responses was a collection of essays published in 1874, The Education of American Girls. Jacobi’s contribution to that collection, “Mental Action and Physical Health,” explains the integration of her theories of female physiology and women’s educational rights and also attacks Clarke’s reasoning about the causes of disease, his expertise about physiology, and the absence of experimental evidence in support of his claims. Rejecting the physiological basis of prescribing menstruation-related rest to women, Jacobi argued that both men and women benefited from engaging in physical and mental activities.

In 1874, Jacobi anonymously submitted the treatise The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation to the 1874 Boylston Medical Prize competition of Harvard Medical School, and scholars argue that it made a substantial contribution to both medical science and the women’s health movement of the nineteenth century. In that work, Jacobi helped disprove the medical proposition that menstruation physically and mentally impairs women, and that they therefore need rest during the week they are menstruating. Jacobi also argued that, rather than being based in fact, the assumption of impairment serves to keep women from making progress in the workplace, thus reinforcing institutional conditions benefiting men. In her study, Jacobi surveyed 268 women about their experiences with menstruation. Jacobi also monitored study participants’ energy levels and vital signs and concluded that women were not impaired by menstruation each month.

As a result of her work, Jacobi’s anonymous submission won the Boylston Prize. However, according to Sharra L. Vostral, associate professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, when she accepted the award, representatives of the institution expressed disappointment that a woman had conducted the study. They refused to publish Jacobi’s work, leading to its eventual publication by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1877. According to researchers Katherine N. Girgis and Latha Ganti, Jacobi’s accomplishments showed that nineteenth-century women could conduct and present scientific studies rivaling the quality of their male counterparts.

Jacobi also challenged the views of the 1889 book Evolution of Sex, written by Patrick Geddes, a professor of botany at University College, Dundee, Scotland, renamed University of Dundee as of 1967, and John Arthur Thomson, a professor at Dick Veterinary College in Edinburgh, Scotland. According to Davis, the treatise proposed that the distinction between female and male traits takes its most fundamental form in the biological functions of two types of cells believed at the time to be involved in metabolism, the process by which bodies convert food into energy. In Geddes and Thomson nineteenth-century theory, “male” katabolic cells are small and active energy consumers, breaking down substances, while “female” anabolic cells are large and passive, storing nutrients. According to Davis, Jacobi rejected the theory, interpreting cellular activity as fundamentally similar between organisms and not reflective of significant sexual differences.

According to Davis, Jacobi’s critique of that kind of biological essentialism, the belief system that specific characteristics, behaviors, or abilities are linked to a person’s biology, informed her advocacy for women in medicine. In published papers, Jacobi addressed what she called the female-physician question, arguing that, in the absence of reliable tests of an individual’s ability to become a physician, the medical establishment instead often used gender distinctions to safeguard its professional standards. She argued that, whenever a profession enters a period of change, such as that experienced by physicians with the new influx of women doctors, competency should be the relevant standard. 

Vivisection and Suffrage

By 1889, Jacobi increasingly argued that vivisection was a crucial avenue for women to prove their scientific and medical capabilities. During the era following the US Civil War, vivisection became a controversial practice both within the medical community and among the general public. By advocating for vivisection, Jacobi sought to challenge the gender biases of her time, demonstrating that women could not only perform such experiments but also advance the scientific community’s understanding of biology and human health. For Jacobi, vivisection represented an opportunity to prove that women in the medical field were capable of more than the nurturing roles conventionally filled by midwives and the majority of female practitioners of medicine in the nineteenth century.

On 12 June 1889, Jacobi delivered an address at the annual dinner of the Massachusetts Medical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. In Jacobi’s speech, entitled “The Practical Study of Biology,” she stated that live-animal experiments are necessary for training future physicians. Promoting a scientific approach to medicine that focused on experimentation and dissection, Jacobi insisted that only by studying the still-functioning organs of living animals could physicians uncover the inner workings of the human body. In her paper “School of Medicine for Women of the New York Infirmary,” Jacobi insists that laboratory experiments, especially involving dissection and vivisection, are a crucial part of medical education and an avenue for women to gain authority and acceptance in the male-dominated field of medicine. Jacobi’s commitment to laboratory-based experimental medicine, however, was not without its critics.

Physician Elizabeth Blackwell, one of the first women to acquire a medical degree in the United States, opposed experimentation on both humans and animals, arguing that it transformed them from living subjects into objects of inquiry. Blackwell also opposed the practice of vivisection, considering it morally degrading to both the faculty of medical schools and to their students, especially women. According to Bittel, Blackwell’s stance was reflective of broader concerns about vivisection’s incompatibility with the feminine ideals of compassion and gentleness that many associated with women’s roles in medicine. In stark contrast, Bittel states, Jacobi believed that the antivivisection movement was not only harmful to women’s progress as medical practitioners but also did injury to the cause of women’s rights more broadly by reaffirming the view of women as prone to sentimentalism.

Despite their disagreement over vivisection, Jacobi and Blackwell admired and respected one another, according to Regina Markell Morantz, an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, and shared a common cause in the US suffrage movement. The movement, in which Jacobi became deeply involved by the 1890s, advocated for the right of women to have a legal vote. Jacobi argued that the education and professional advancements made by women since the US Civil War showed their strength and intellectual capacity to fully participate in public life, including the vote. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which prohibits the denial of a citizen’s right to vote based on sex, was ratified many decades later, in 1920.

Legacy and Impact

Jacobi’s example, advocacy, and research reshaped medical education for women, fundamentally changing their access to opportunities in the medical field previously reserved for men. In 1866, she became the first woman accepted to the École de Médecine, and in 1872, she became the first woman admitted to the New York Academy of Medicine. Jacobi dispelled the notion that menstruation debilitated women, which men used to justify their exclusion from scientific research and medical work. In 1872, she also founded the Association for the Advancement of the Medical Education of Women, an organization that advocated for women to receive the same clinical experiences as male students. Throughout her life, Jacobi published over 120 scientific articles and nine books.

By the 1880s, Jacobi had initiated reforms at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, pushing for a more scientific and experimental curriculum. Her creation of a medical curriculum for women that paralleled the standards of Harvard Medical School, alongside her research publications, showed that women could conduct scientific work with the same rigor as men, leading to the inclusion of women in educational and professional spaces once closed to them. According to Girgis and Ganti, Jacobi’s work directly helped contribute to the inclusion of women at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, starting when the school opened in 1893, marking a major shift in the acceptance of women in medical fields.

Jacobi died from brain cancer on 10 June 1906 at age 63 in New York City.

Sources

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