Stunning in its detail. Important, shocking, and moving, it is the story of the first women in medicine, moving from midwifery to physicians. Their journey is inspiring. But the equal bravery of the women upon whom male physicians performed surgery is horrifying in what they were subjected to. This is an essential book on more than just the evolution of the practice of medicine. It also reveals the venality of misogyny illuminating not only what was, and which has not been eliminated, but also how far we’ve come and the tension between Doe and post-Doe attitudes toward women in the public discourse. A important look at progress.

I received this an ARC through Netgalley. Lydia Reeder did a wonderful job of sharing detailed information in a way that was easy to digest. It read like narrative non-fiction and was easy to follow. I know there were some backwards and incorrect theories about menstruations, but did not realize the extent. All of these women should be applauded and known for all their hardwork and bravery to fight for rights we take for granted today and for making sure facts are known.

2 stars

Yes, I'm very interested in reading about the advancement of women in various scientific careers. No, I'm NOT interested in reading yet another account of how every male is to blame for everything bad that has happened in the past, current events, and probably the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This highly accessible book is a well-researched and engaging historical account of the medical strides made by not only Dr. Putnam Jacobi, but also of the other pioneering women healers and physicians in the closed-rank, male-dominated medical profession in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Embracing clinical research as her basis for the study and treatment of gynecological issues and other medical issues affecting women's health uniquely, Dr. Putnam Jacobi challenged the woefully inadequate treatment of women's issues by over-confident male physicians who were, in some cases, more concerned with their celebrity and income than they were in actually helping women, and advanced women's health, often discrediting men's misguided theories about women's physiology and debunking such popular, but often tragic, treatments as the "rest cure," removing ovaries, and just plain bad advice and bad medicine. This deep dive explains the barriers these pioneering women of science and compassion faced were soul-crushing and their successes were uniformly hard-won. Not quite five stars because it dragged in a few places, but much closer to five stars than four.

Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Ms. Reeder for the opportunity to read this fascinating historical account.

Full of interesting and provocative historical facts, I found The Cure for Women very intriguing and entertaining at times. There were some areas that just made me mad at the way women were treated in the past and some very good examples of how history constantly repeats itself. Definitely a thought provoking read that will stay with me awhile. Great historical nonfiction!

"The Cure for Women" is about the first women doctors in America, the men who opposed them, and the fight for women to be accepted at male medical schools. It's more about what the author felt about the various people and events than quotes of what the women themselves said. The information about Mary Putnam Jacobi only took up about a third of the book. The book started by telling about the Blackwell sisters and a couple of other prominent women doctors, then we got into Mary's life. But the author tended to digress and give biographies and backstories for anyone new introduced into the story. For example, there's a chapter detailing a male doctor's 'rest cure' for women which also told details about several woman who took his cure, one dying afterward and the others finally breaking free of all male restraints to live healthy lives.

I hadn't expected so many biographies beyond Mary's and felt like they slowed the pacing and sometimes didn't even have to do with Mary's interesting story. Also, the author portrayed men as controlling, manipulative, childishly hateful, and basically willing to torture and subjugate women to achieve their own goals. She's convinced me that some of the main male opponents were pretty horrible people, but the supportive men were barely mentioned.

As Mary apparently published a lot of her research, and a number of the women doctors were the first to do things that other schools and hospitals later picked up, I'd expected more of a focus on what they accomplished. I was fascinated by Mary's innovative research showing that the menstrual cycle did not indicate that a woman was 'in heat' nor was it a sign of reoccurring weakness. Instead, this book was written as an epic battle between clever, independent women and white supremist males determined to force women back into a role of baby-making machines.

I received an ebook review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Cure for Women
By Lydia Reeder

This book deals with two things: the horror of women's medical treatment when males – both husbands and male doctors - ran the show; and what it took for women to finally gain a place at the table of women's health care.

It was only when women began to make strides in becoming doctors that women's health care and the need for women caring for women began to be recognized.

While horrifying in many ways, this book is a must read for women.

Much like another book I read this month, the title of this book is very misleading. Is this a book about Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi? Absolutely. BUT, it is also a book about all the women who came before her [including, but not limited to Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell {there is a LOT about them, especially Emily}, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams and many others who's names escape me now] and a few after as well, and helped pave the way for women in medicine and women's rights overall.

While this was an outstanding book and I learned so much [the research here is clearly extensive], I wanted to much more of Dr. Jacobi; the parts that were just her were just so fascinating and I found myself disappointed with then story veered off in another direction. So while I DID enjoy this, I ended up wishing it was so much more. I would not hesitate to recommend it though as it is a deep-dive into women in medicine and is a jumping off point to do more reading on the subject, all while getting an excellently written and researched book to start with.

I have not had the pleasure of listening to Sara Sheckells before [that I remember], and I was left hoping that this isn't my last time listening to her narration. Ms. Sheckells has a lovely quiet voice that tells this important story in such a way that keeps you fully engaged and I highly recommend this audiobook and narrator.

Thank you to NetGalley, Lydia Reeder, Sara Sheckells - Narrator, St. Martin's Press, and Dreamscape Media for providing the audiobook and eBook ARC's in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fascinating look into the world of medicine during the late 1800s. A time when women were mocked, ridiculed, misunderstood, mistreated and laughed at in so many arenas, especially in the field of medicine. Well researched and well written, the author provided a detailed account of Mary Jacobi’s life and career. Her influence and impact is still being felt to this day. The women’s suffrage movement is also detailed in the book as it was tied to and occurring alongside with women’s rights in medicine. Reeder’s book reminds us how far we have come, but still the lengths needed to go for racial equality in medicine.

I wanted to like this more than I did, but even though it is well-written, and clearly well researched, I kept getting lost in all of the details.

Following the history of Dr. Mary Putman Jacobi, the author provides what is expected. It is the deviations, which I concede are important and crucial to our understanding of Victorian medicine, that seem to make it difficult to read and a bit convoluted. This is not a book I would recommend to someone that isn't a scholar with a particular focus on the topic. I did learn a lot about the topics discussed, but it was a bit rough to get through, in my opinion. I did recommend this to my mom since she has a background in medicine.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC of this work in exchange for my honest review.

Women have really only come into their own in the past century or so, though many struggled to improve their lives, as well as those of their families, neighbors, and others like the poor or disabled, through health issues or war injuries. Till close to the end of the 1800's, women couldn't even control the money they brought into their marriages, couldn't take their children and leave an abusive marriage, couldn't, for the most part, even have much education except in the "womanly" arts! Those who struggled to learn and live a fuller life were held back by society as a whole, as well as most unenlightened parents, spouses, relatives, even friends. However, a brave few did succeed in higher learning, particularly in medicine, though many were inspired to become nurses by Florence Nightingale, after her work duing the Crimean War. That did lead the way for more to want to be schooled, even as doctors, though many schools, male students, as well as families, fought to prevent further education for women, deemed too fragile for such things. By sheer perseverance women started to succeed in achieving doctoral education, though often in Europe itself, rather than the US or Endland, and eventually paved the way for acceptance of women into university. What many went through, treated with scorn, physical and mental pain, lack of resources, would have been enough to daunt mothose early st men, let alone women, of that time, but women battled and struggled and succeeded despite efforts to stymie their progress. Today, there are as many as, if not slightly more, women attending medical schools than men, so those earlier female trailblazers succeeded in their mission to allow education for everyone.

True stories of the women who pioneered medicine. It is always fascinating to learn about the struggles and triumphs of people and if you are especially interested in learning how women have overcome social barriers, this is a great book for you. Would offer a lot of discussion points for book clubs. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC #sponsored

2.5 rounded down

This is a very big, very packed book, apparently diligently researched. It addresses the persistent efforts of mid-nineteenth-century American women to gain access to medical education and physician training. Blocked by male doctors, these innovative and determined individuals created their own medical schools, as well as hospitals and clinics for women and children, even as they continued to agitate for entry into established mainstream medical institutions. They energetically and strategically networked with wealthy, influential socialites and thinkers in order to gain funding for their projects.

The key figure in the book is Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, the foremost female physician-scientist of her time. Unfortunately, we often lose sight of her for large stretches due to the author’s tendency to get sidetracked. Other women doctors—the Blackwell sisters (Elizabeth and Emily), Ann Preston, and German-American Marie Zakrzewska (and a few men, primarily painted as the enemy) also loom large. An amalgam of biography, history, medical and social science, this text is also a sort of feminist disquisition and a virtual who’s who of the suffragist and women’s rights movement. By the end of the text, a coeducational graduate medical school is slated to open at Johns Hopkins due to the efforts and money of wealthy young female philanthropists, and the book turns to the matter of women’s suffrage itself.

Much of the content the author presents was new to me. I wish I were better equipped to assess her interpretation of some of the material. However, there was enough of a slant to Reeder’s writing to prevent my fully trusting her. I think her unnecessary mention of Jordan Peterson as a “modern-day Victorian” started it. Apparently, the issue is that “he has published three books arguing that women’s capabilities are defined by their biology and their evolutionary ties to child-rearing.” (No specific passages from his work are supplied as support.) She then goes on to suggest that Peterson is in the same league as a couple of the nineteenth-century physicians she features, men vehemently opposed to and actively engaged in obstructing women’s access to higher education. I have not read Peterson’s books, but I’ve seen him interviewed multiple times and have not heard him question women’s intelligence or their right to pursue an education or a career of their choosing. I do not find the idea that evolution and biology have shaped the interests, behaviour, and personalities of the sexes unreasonable or objectionable. This idea doesn’t exclude the impact of culture, nor do I see it as reason to deny women opportunities to advance in the larger world.

Some sections of The Cure for Women interested me a good deal more than others. For instance, I found the biographical sections about Mary Putnam Jacobi strong and engaging —particularly the parts describing her dogged attempts to gain entry into the Sorbonne’s École de Médecine, the fatal illness of her young son, and her faltering marriage to “father of pediatrics” Dr. Abraham Jacobi (who turned out to be more a product of his times—sexist, stodgy, inflexible, and less egalitarian—than Mary had bargained for). However, I regularly lost patience with the book. Perhaps the first great trial was Reeder’s lengthy chapter on Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke’s 1875 controversial book Sex in Education, in which the Harvard-affiliated physician-author declared his opposition to the coeducation of males and females and argued against girls engaging in any intensive intellectual activity. Clarke received considerable public and institutional support for the absurd notion that when females studied too much, bodily energy was diverted from the uterus and ovaries, compromising function of those organs and potentially causing infertility, insanity, and even death. He was a eugenicist who evidently feared the Anglo Saxon race was threatened if its women left the domestic sphere. According to him, girls shouldn’t be exercising their brains at all when menstruating; they should be resting. Reeder really goes to town on this matter: she seems to have included rebuttals to Clarke’s ideas from every leading light of the period.

Women’s rights activists, concerned that real setbacks could occur in response to Clarke’s assertions, engaged the esteemed Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi in the battle. The scientific research she subsequently conducted on the female reproductive system was shaped into an essay, which won a prestigious Harvard University prize. Based on her findings, she’d concluded: “There is nothing in the nature of menstruation to imply the necessity, or even the desirability, of rest.” Jacobi would also go on to criticize—and offer an alternative to—prominent neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell’s famous “rest cure”, a six-to-eight week isolation treatment for “neurasthenic” women (who were experiencing lassitude, emotional disturbance, and anorexia and whom Weir Mitchell viewed as being disobedient, spoiled, selfish, arrogant, and malingering). His treatment sometimes involved force feeding and painful, humiliating remedies for constipation. This “therapy” is the focus of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story The Yellow Wallpaper. Those familiar with Virginia Woolf’s life are certainly aware of the rest cure as well.

I don’t think anyone can dispute that Weir Mitchell’s paternalistic, pathologically controlling approach to women’s mental distress was horrendous. Some women died while under his care. Reeder, relying on Nancy Cervetti’s biography of Mitchell for details, describes the case of one of them—Winnie (the daughter of renowned novelist William Dean Howells) who died while being held in one of his clinics. (view spoiler) Was Mitchell as bad as he’s presented in this book, and did the harms done by his rest cure completely overshadow his actual significant accomplishments? Not having read a biography of him, I find it hard to judge. However, I have reservations about Reeder’s unrelentingly negative portrait of this physician, sometimes called the father of American neurology. She covers his unpromising and directionless youth, disparagingly comments on his literary oeuvre, scornfully notes the opulent setting in which he lived, but she mainly highlights (alongside his rest cure) his vivisectionist experimentation, depicting him as an arrogant peacock and a cruel, even sadistic scientist. She foregoes mentioning any of his discoveries, many related to his work with soldiers of the Civil War: the naming and describing of causalgia (complex regional pain syndrome), erythromelalgia (a vascular-neurological condition that causes painful reddening of the hands and feet), and phantom-limb syndrome to name a few.

The author’s own “heroine” Mary Putnam Jacobi also performed experiments on live animals, “was a leading proponent of vivisection,” and advocated for her students to learn from it as part of their scientific medical education. It is intimated in the book that her animal experimentation was humane and merciful. I’m doubtful. In childhood, Jacobi had shocked her mother by stating her wish to cut open a dead rat to view its internal organs. As a young medical professor, she was impatient and disdainful of her students to the point that a group of them circulated a petition demanding that she be let go or at least cautioned. Yes, Jacobi was formidable—and that no doubt got her where she wanted to be. It appears that she wasn’t known for having an agreeable or compassionate nature. She made it clear that she valued reason over emotion—the latter of which she equated with sentimentality.

Exhaustively (and exhaustingly) detailed, this book runs to well over 350 pages. While I did learn a fair bit, I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Part of the problem is that I’m just not interested in reading about the somewhat niche subject of women’s struggle for entry into mainstream medical schools, which is a huge part of this book, or about the machinations involved in women’s obtaining the vote (in the state of New York ). I would’ve preferred a concise text with a more nuanced approach than Reeder offers. A sustained focus on Mary Putnam Jacobi herself would have been welcome. Going in, that’s what I thought I was getting.

I believe huge sections of this text could have been safely cut (for example, the numerous descriptions of meetings for medical school fundraising and women’s suffrage, the biographical sketches of peripheral figures—such as Jacobi’s husband’s best friend from childhood, details about the interior of the dean of Bryn Mawr’s Victorian gothic cottage (who cares?!), the lengthy discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s case and the full summary of her famous novella—we can read it for ourselves if we want to! The author makes much of gender fluidity and how likely Putnam Jacobi would have been to embrace such an idea and the work some researchers are now engaged in to prove that there is no “male” or “female” brain. Based on my reading, I understand that women’s and men’s brains are more alike than different, but the evidence I’ve seen does point to some notable variations. Gender fluidity is not a concept I find myself interested in or sympathetic to. I simply believe that neither women nor men should be prevented from reaching their potential or be barred from pursuing interests or careers traditionally associated with the opposite sex.

I see that many have enjoyed this text, but in the end I can’t recommend it, having too often found it teeth-grindingly tedious. My main feeling upon completion is absolute relief.

This book is the history of Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and her efforts to provide medical education to women in the U.S. Jacobi was trained in Europe but returned to the States to teach and manage her own medical practice. She was a published researcher who pioneered scientific methods of conducting research with human subjects. As her influence grew, she played a key role in funding the Johns Hopkins University graduate school for medicine, which was the first to provide a coeducational environment for medical students. The author gives the reader the profiles of many other prominent women doctors, as well as men doctors. Jacobi became active in the suffrage cause and motivated many of New York City’s distinguished and wealthy women to support a woman’s right to vote. This is an account of women’s rights issues in the 19th century that has continuing relevance today.

Well written and interesting, but does not cover any new ground about early women doctors not already out there. I'd hoped for more.

This is a fantastic and empowering book on the struggles and fights women had to put up with to finally getting acknowledged as beings with a functional brain. Many parts of this book are enraging to read, realizing how men were diminishing them in order to stay in power and in control of the medical field. But thank to women such as Mary Putnam, who pushed through, and who knew that she was worth a whole lot, she made it possible for women to become nurses, doctors, surgeons. A must-read if you want to have more meat to chew on next time you are having a debate with a man over women history.

The Cure for Women reintroduces Mary Putnam Jacobi to modern readers and tells the story of women in medicine, delving into the challenges they faced (and still do) and details of opponents (white men) who used women's medical issues and pain to create cures that boosted their careers without any scientific evidence or validated results.

The Cure for Women by Lydia Reeder, a fascinating story.
Until I read this book, I had never heard of Mary Putnam. She was quite an amazing woman.
These women fought for the right to become a doctor, endured ridicule from the male students and teachers. The lengths the male society went to underscore the achievement accomplished by the females and stop them from attending lectures. Publishing reports that were downright ridiculing woman issues. I have read quite a number of books on women’s suffrage and what is disappointing is that a lot of these woman were fighting for their own rights and education but only containing within their own class.
This is a beautifully written book. It is obvious that the author did her research. Also written in a style that is easy to read and keeps you interested till the end.

In The Cure for Women, Lydia Reeder begins by providing a picture of the state of the practice of medicine in the United States in the mid 19th century and women’s place within that picture. Needless to say, women were tolerated by some doctors in their relatively new roles as nurses (where they assisted during the Civil War). Some men thought women should be shielded from such horrors as exposure to wounds, male bodies unclothed, etc. At this time there was a budding movement of women who sought to become doctors. No medical school in the U.S. would accept a woman. But there were women-led medical schools which were teaching women all pertinent subjects, their founders having been educated in Europe. The doctors Gladwell were among the early leaders inspiring Mary Putnam, daughter of publisher George Putnam.

This book is the story of Mary Putnam (one day to become Jacobi with marriage) and her lifelong work to not only become a doctor but to bring more American women along with her. It places her firmly in her time and amidst the forces affecting her struggle, primarily the vast majority of physicians of the United States who saw women as beings with one destiny, being healthy mothers of white babies. The eugenics movement was underway in the latter half of the 19th century and women’s primary area of importance was known and noted to these men. Examples of essays and articles are provided in the text. One fascinating detail for me was that Mary Putnam Jacobi and other women scientists and European trained doctors were using harder science and practices than their male counterparts.

This is a fascinating study, with references to the primary source (diaries, articles, speeches, etc) primarily cited second hand though many examples are provided at least in part. There is an extensive section of footnotes. I recommend this book to anyone interested in women’s struggles for equality not only in education and the workplace but as human beings, a struggle that continues today.

Rating 4.5 rounded to 4


I received an eARC from St Martin’s Press through NetGalley.

When I was in grade school, I read a biography of Elizabeth Blackwell who, as many know, was the pioneering woman physician. I was reminded of her and the other bold women in medicine who struggled to find their places in what was a male dominated profession for many years. Mary Jacobi helped to change that narrative.

GP Putnam-I knew his name because of his work as a publisher. I did not know that he had a daughter named Mary Jacobi. She achieved a great deal as is related in this well told work of nonfiction that focuses on both her personal life and her accomplishments. Educated at the Sorbonne (a feat in itself), Jacobi went on to trail blaze for women in medicine.

Anyone interested in women’s history and the history of medicine will, I think, want to give this title a read. It was quite interesting.

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for this title. All opinions are my own.