Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn - Hardcover

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195126246 ISBN 13: 9780195126242

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

In the spring of 1889, a burgeoning Brooklyn newspaper, the Daily Eagle, printed a series of articles that detailed a history of midnight hearses and botched operations performed by a scalpel-eager female surgeon named Dr. Mary Dixon-Jones. The ensuing avalanche of public outrage gave rise to two trials--one for manslaughter and one for libel--that became a late nineteenth-century sensation.
Vividly recreating both trials, Regina Morantz-Sanchez provides a marvelous historical whodunit, inviting readers to sift through the evidence and evaluate the witnesses. Conduct Unbecoming a Woman is mesmerizing as an intricately crafted suspense novel. Jars of specimens and surgical mannequins became common spectacles in the courtroom, and the roughly 300 witnesses that testified represented a fascinating social cross-section of the city's inhabitants, from humble immigrant craftsmen and seamstresses to some of New York and Brooklyn's most prestigious citizens and physicians. Like many legal extravaganzas of our own time, the Mary Dixon-Jones trials highlighted broader social issues in America. It unmasked apprehension about not only the medical and social implications of radical gynecological surgery, but also the rapidly changing role of women in society. Indeed, the courtroom provided a perfect forum for airing public doubts concerning the reputation of one "unruly" woman doctor whose life-threatening procedures offered an alternative to the chronic, debilitating pain of 19th-century women.
Clearly a extraordinary event in 1892, the cases disappeared from the historical record only a few years later. "Conduct Unbecoming a Woman" brilliantly reconstructs both the Dixon-Jones trials and the historic panorama that was 1890s Brooklyn.

About this title

Review

In the winter of 1892, Dr. Mary Amanda Dixon Jones sued the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for libel. The suit stemmed from a series of articles that questioned Dixon Jones's ethics, honesty, and abilities as a surgeon; so inflammatory were they that two manslaughter indictments and eight malpractice suits followed their publication. Exonerated on all counts, Dixon Jones sought restitution from her journalistic accusers. Conduct Unbecoming a Woman is the story of that now-forgotten trial, as compelling as any modern courtroom drama.

In America, heavily publicized court trials often serve as bellwethers of coming social change. The legal battles of Mary Amanda Dixon Jones helped both to define the role of women physicians at the end of the 19th century and to legitimize the field of gynecology within the medical establishment. But Conduct Unbecoming a Woman is not only a medical/legal drama; it's also a tale of a city, Brooklyn, desperately seeking to retain its cosmopolitan identity as nearby Manhattan encroaches, plus a look at the newspaper business in the era of yellow journalism. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, a professor at the University of Michigan, is an expert on the historical role of women in medicine, having explored the subject in two previous books, In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians and Sympathy and Science. --Patrizia DiLucchio

About the Author

Regina Morantz-Sanchez is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Widely published in the areas of women's history, gender, sexuality, and medicine, she is the author of In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians and Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0195126246
• ISBN 13: 9780195126242
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304