Three Medical Women of the 19th Century

A recent "Why Is This Happening" podcast featured the author of a book called Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist. Madame Restell (Ann Trow Lohman) was active in New York between the 1830s and the 1870s, and as the author explains, was motivated by the plight of women who had no access to contraception. She also managed to make an extremely good living, though for at least some length of time she offered sliding-scale fees, depending on a woman's ability to pay. The podcast (and the latter years of Madame Restell's life) include the absurd Comstock Laws, which — incredibly — are once again becoming relevant.

After hearing the podcast, I remembered a sign I had seen in Cortland, New York five years ago:

At the time, I looked up Lydia Strowbridge and found a local story about her that said she got into some amount of legal trouble for performing abortions, not mentioned on the sign. But when I search for that now I can't find anything about it. I'll keep trying to figure out what that was.

All I find now is basic information about her, which is interesting enough. She was born in 1830 near Cortland. Her father — maybe both her parents, though sources don't include info about her mother's politics — was an abolitionist. She married in 1851 and had a few sons. When her husband went off to join the Civil War, somehow she managed to go down to New York City to attend medical school. (I wonder who was watching the kids?) 

She attended what appears to have been a semi-quack college called the Hygeio Therapeutic Medical College, which was in business for about 10 years. Its focus was on water cures and hygiene, so maybe that latter part wasn't completely wrong. It also was coeducational, unlike most other medical schools, and attracted a high proportion of women students, with a parallel amount of feminist thinking happening among the student body.

Lydia was part of the National Dress Reform Association and was its president from 1857–58, well before she left Cortland for school. (As you may remember, Amelia Bloomer was from Homer, one town north of Cortland.) She was also a suffragist and active in the temperance movement. And of course, she practiced medicine in Cortland for many years after the war, focusing on women and children.

Reading about Lydia led me to read about her college, and that took me to another student from the same period, Mary Dixon Jones. Mary started teaching physiology right out of high school in the mid-1840s and then apprenticed herself to various medical men. She also married and had children, and then during the Civil War attended Hygeio, so I hypothesize that she and Lydia knew each other there.

Mary set up practice in Brooklyn after finishing her degree and became an obstetrics and gynecology surgeon. She kept furthering her skills by studying at various institutions and along side a range of practitioners. She became a pathologist as well. She "published over fifty medical articles and was an associate editor of the American Journal of Surgery and Gynecology, and the Woman's Medical Journal." She was the first American doctor to perform a total hysterectomy for a uterine fibroid.

She sounds like an amazing person, right? Now hear this.

In 1889 (when Mary was about 61), the Brookyn Eagle newspaper launched a 24-part series of her work at the Woman's Hospital of Brooklyn, based on the premise that they were doing unnecessary surgery to further Mary's reputation, and that she was mishandling the hospital's money. She (and her son, who was also a surgeon at the hospital) were charged with manslaughter. There were a bunch of malpractice suits, too.

In early 1890, they were found not guilty of all charges. In response, and understandably, I think, Mary filed suit against the Eagle for $300,000 in damages.

Unfortunately for Mary, though, this is where being an extremely competent 60-something-year-old woman who was used to being in charge of a surgical team and part of a hospital did not work for her. 

When her attorneys put her on the stand in the damages case in 1892, what happened?

Based on her interactions with the judge, the all-male jury perceived her as un-motherly and not the caring doctor that her lawyers had suggested. Her confident attitude was noted as “especially heinous” because she was a woman physician. The Eagle’s lawyer said that she had “unsexed” herself by demanding to be addressed as “Doctor,” instead of “Mrs.” During his closing brief, he pronounced her as “an old woman” with an “uplifted knife,” and even hinted at witchery. After 37 hours of deliberation, the jury found the Eagle innocent of libeling her in 1892 and Jones lost the suit. When she lost the case her hospital’s charter was revoked and she was forced to close it for good.

Of course it's to be expected that there was an all-male jury in the pre-19th-Amendment era, and that wouldn't be too likely now. But the parts about demanding to be called "doctor" could have happened last week (right, Dr. Jill Biden?). The ageism isn't unfamiliar either. And I wonder if it's not common for women physicians these days to be counseled to soften themselves for just these reasons. 

And losing the case wasn't the end of it:

Tensions around the press got so high that a month after Jones lost the libel suit, her son Charles broke into the home of Dr. Joseph H. Raymond, the former Brooklyn Health Commissioner and editor of the Brooklyn Medical Journal. Charles dragged the older man from his bed and horsewhipped him when he refused to retract a negative additional that had just been published by the Journal. 

Which sounds like a remnant of the era of duels, just as the fears whipped up by the original series sound like an echo of fears from the era of grave-robbing. 

So there they are: three 19th century women I never knew about, doing some version of medical care when it was not a popular choice. More power to them.