I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is fascinating and well-researched. I learned a lot from reading it!

Well, I knew I wasn't going to feel great as a dude at the end of The Cure for Women, but I powered through anyways. Lydia Reeder tells the story of Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and various other women as they take on the medical patriarchy who are real jerks. In some cases, they were legit psychos who experimented on Black women without anesthesia.

Unfortunately, the writing in this one is what let me down. First, Reeder often goes off on tangential stories which don't have to do with Jacobi but do have to do with women in medicine. You wouldn't single out any one thread and say it's completely out of left field, but you probably would object to so many topics that don't relate directly to Jacobi's story. In fact, Jacobi herself doesn't really show up until the very end of the second chapter. This is not a fatal flaw of the book, but it is noticeable.

The other problem with the writing is much more serious and quite ironic. Reeder tends to use her own words to tell the story and avoids quoting the women directly. You get a lot of paragraphs which read like, "Then she did this. Then she did this. And she didn't like this person." These women were prolific and clearly there were sources to pull from. It made for a slog because I want to hear from the source. For instance, Elizabeth Blackwell features prominently, especially in the beginning of the book. I kept feeling like I wasn't getting to know Blackwell, but rather I was getting to know what Reeder thought of Blackwell. Later in the book, Reeder finally quotes fully a letter Blackwell sent to Jacobi. It was the first time I felt like I knew who Blackwell was as a person (and leader because her guidance in this letter was pitch perfect). Reeder does become more willing to quote towards the end. Unfortunately, this is too far into the narrative and it is not used enough to save the story.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and St. Martin's Press.)

Ate (thought the plot got lost in the explanations of stuff sometimes). Very interesting stuff about women in medicine, these people were so cool. Book was really well researched and in-depth which I liked.

I have spent most of my adult life defending and working for the rights of all women and yet through the reading of this beautiful and non fiction “The Cure For Women” there are important factions of The Victorian Era which have allowed me to glean further justification that my time was more than well spent.
Mary Putnam Jacobi was a “glass ceiling” breaking pioneering woman who broke through the male dominated field of medicine. A wonderful and informative book that deserves to be required college reading to clearly bring into focus all that women have achieved in order to pave the way for the success of all future generations.
Form my heart, thank you Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for the honor of reading this masterpiece early. I will be purchasing a hard copy for my library and to share with younger humans.

Truly a tour de force, covering the history of women’s rights and discrimination not only in the medical profession but in daily life. This book is not just a biography of one of the foremost medical minds of the nineteenth century, but provides a front seat view into the struggle for women’s rights, and how misogyny pervaded every institution, socially and fundamentally. This work is written almost like narrative fiction, but with the first-person primary source material woven skillfully into the piece. I learned an astonishing amount of facts, that I was able to verify were all quite true, and would very much like to read other works by this author.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is an amazing and incredible book. I had never heard of Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and that’s a shame. She has done for some in medicine than anyone. She was absolutely brilliant and very ahead of her time in thinking and understanding medicine and the human body. And many times, her work was unrecognized or stolen by male doctors. She fought hard with other women doctors to establish a medical school and hospital for women and while successful, did not live long enough to see women finally be admitted to coed education. But without her fighting so hard, it would have never happened.

She and many other women doctors of her time had studied in Europe which was more progressive and ahead of the US enabling her to get a degree in medicine and train with doctors who in my opinion, were better than those in the US at the time. She understood that women’s bodies were not controlled by mere hysteria, but had very specific biological needs. She strove to understand and properly treat women’s bodies and really changed the way we view and understand gynecology.

I hope more people read this book and find out about this amazing woman who fought so hard to give women the right to work in medicine. She has been largely ignored by history and it’s time she decided the recognition she deserves. This book does a wonderful job of telling her story.

I received this book for free in exchange for my honest review.

The Cure for Women was a very informative look at many facets of Gilded Age medicine, including how female doctors broke into the field, their role in the development of gynecology and obstetrics, and how it all intersected with the broader women's rights and suffrage movements. It also feels like an incredibly timely book, given the current landscape of reproductive rights in the United States -- the book also touches on how abortion, a previously accepted medical procedure, was turned by white, male doctors into a controversial issue (hint: it was racism).

One thing I really enjoyed about this book was that while it was well-researched and full of information, it was extremely readable, making it accessible to readers who aren't necessarily historians. Based on that, I look forward to recommending this book to colleagues and my older students who are interested in reproductive rights and Victorian history.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press for providing a review copy.

Thanks to netgalley for the ARC! This book was suggested to me because of past reading I did. I’m honestly not sure I would’ve grabbed it in my own, and that would’ve been a mistake! I feel like this book should be on a list of required reading so we can see how far we have come and how much we need to protect our gains as current times see us losing some of them for women. I have not stopped talking about this book to people since I started reading it. First, the book had a lot of great info that was presented in an engaging manner that kept me reaching to read it every day. Although the book does concentrate mostly on Mary Putnam Jacobi, the author does a great job weaving in other stories of women who worked hard to gain both suffrage and acceptance for women physicians in education and hospitals and reputation. I also enjoyed how there was history woven in to get a feel for the time period and where we were in America and the rest of the world (ie information about Napoleon). I admit I’m not a history buff, but books like this make me want to dive into time periods and topics that newly interest me. Without giving anything away, I’ll say the book covers such important topics as women’s rights, the idiotic views and studies of how women’s brains just do not have the capacity or energy for higher education and careers because of things like menstrual cycles and how they were expected to just be wives and birth babies all while you are reading about these absolutely brilliant women like Jacobi who were surpassing men in their field and even being pioneers in things like sanitation during treatments and surgeries. Honestly, the advancements of women in education, particular medicine, and the advancements of women in medical careers at this time are phenomenal considering men and America were trying their hardest to hold them back. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the medical field, women in history, and/or women’s rights.

An excellent book telling the story of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate Medical School and the women who came after her, waiting to prove they had what it took to be called Doctor.

And they did. The struggles these women went through, would have had most of us choosing another career option!

But the persevered and we are so glad that they did. This is a true story of the sexism that goes on in the field of science. At this time we still don't have control over our own bodies.

I really enjoyed this glimpse of history.

NetGalley/ St. Martin's Press December 02, 2024

4.5 stars, rounded up to 5

The Cure for Women is one of the most important books ever written, in my opinion. Lydia Reeder gives us an in-depth, intense look at how women’s medicine and health has been shaped since the mid-1800s, and how women have tried to take control of their own bodies. This isn’t just a dry book with facts laid bare; Reeder has written a compelling story that shows the reader the lives of women both becoming doctors in a vast field of men clueless about women’s bodies and health, and the view of women as patients, treated as objects.

I found myself at turns furious, sad, and stunned with the realization of what has been done to women over the years, and I can’t believe we still are fighting to have our bodies treated properly. It’s fascinating to see how much and yet how little things have changed in the medical field.

My only quibble with this book is the sometimes confusing time jumps. There are several different women who are having their stories told, and sometimes coming to the end of a section means jumping back again to the beginning for another woman’s story. Overall, though, bravo. This is a book everyone should read.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

I literally went through a hundred emotions reading this. Anger, fury, sadness, compassion and so on. Such an eye opening read into what went on in Victorian era. This is and will be such an important book. I can't wait to purchase a hard copy

Thanks Netgalley for allowing me to read this book. Mary Jacobi was a woman ahead of her times. She believed she could help in a male dominated field. This book was eye opening in what women had to go through many decades ago.

This was an incredibly well researched and well written book. It focuses on the history of women physicians in the field of medicine and those who helped pioneer us into the 20th century, including Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi amongst others. There are some fantastic quotes and facts in this book that would be laughable if they weren’t take as fact back in the 1800s. My favorites include “A grown woman never surpassed the emotional and intellectual development of a teenage boy” regarding why women could never be physicians and “Women can never, as a class, become so competent, safe and reliable medical practitioners as men, no matter what their zeal or opportunities for pupilage.” These are direct quotes from well respected male physicians of the day just showing how in depth of research the author did. I find that often reading these books of historical facts can feel a lot like reading a textbook, but Ms. Reeder really made it feel more like a novel which was enjoyable. My one criticism of the book is that it sometimes felt like she lost the plot. You had to read dates carefully because each chapter would jump around (likely to make the story flow better) and the cast of characters was vast. I also felt that the last chapter, which focused more on women’s suffrage, while important, felt like it should have been part of a different book and strayed from the theme. Other than that, as a woman in medicine myself I learned a lot and I recommend it to anyone interested medical history.

This book is about Mary Putnam Jacobi, a pioneering woman in medicine. The first part of the book chronicles the difficulties of women entering the field of medicine (and universities generally). Later the book moves to describing her education and struggles to achieve acceptance at the most prestigious Ecole de Medcin at the University of Paris. She not only succeeds in gaining entrance but graduates at the top of her class. The remaining portion of the book interleaves her successes and struggles as a physician/professor in New England and her partly successful but difficult personal life. She also becomes involved in other movements of her time and the author details both these movements and the quasi-medicine being practice in that time period. Over the course of her life, while she and a handful of women made progress, the sense is that many more were turned away.

The best part of the book is the detail of the women’s issues that begin to appear at that time. Women not only had trouble attaining advanced education, they were treated as children or worse as property by the men (even well-educated men) of the time.

What I didn’t like about the book is that the author uses her last name Jacobi after she gets married to refer to Dr. Putnam. (She acquired her degrees before she was married.) At one point in the book, the author is describing an argument between Mary and her husband Abraham. She refers to Mary as Jacobi and the husband as Abraham. Oddly, she could just have used Mary and Abraham in that instance since it was a personal argument. The use of Jacobi provides some ambiguity and confusion. The other thing that was a little bit of a problem is the extensive detail about other individuals after the middle part of the book. They become eventually tied but those ties are treated in short ways. This makes the book feel long. It was more interesting, for example, to hear about Dr. Putnam’s involvement with famous suffragettes and these interactions were described in a summary fashion; however, Mitchell (a person who actually didn’t have extensive training) was covered in so much detail that it became tiring. His work and ideas could have easily been summarized and described in relation to Dr. Putnam.

Since I have been reading/researching about the suffrage movement in Boston this spring, I found the details about happenings in NYC not only interesting but sound. The author presents extensive research and should be commended for the thoroughness.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book, but what I got was an extensive reference guide that shed a massive amount of light on the plight of women wishing to join the medical profession in the Victorian era. As the stories of the struggles of individual notable women were told, we learn a lot about what it was like to be a female in need of medical help back then, as well.

It was a lot of information to take in, but treated as a reference book to be returned to again and again, "The Cure for Women" should find a home on the bookshelves of everyone from historians to authors to medical students and professionals to feminists and perhaps most importantly, men. Everyone can learn from the past and this is important history.

My thanks to Lydia Reeder, St. Martin's Press, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a digital advance review copy of this book. This review is my honest and unbiased opinion.

"The Cure for Women" is a thorough biography of the 19th-century physician, Mary Putnam Jacobi. Her story was new to me, and author Lydia Reeder did an excellent job of portraying how difficult it was for Jacobi to become a physician and then to practice as one. She was instrumental in helping other women to become doctors and was also an energetic believer in women's suffrage.

As if that were not enough, Mary Putnam Jacobi was also a wife and mother. She and her husband lost two children; one survived.

Several times I wondered about conclusions Reeder made. I could not find supporting statements from Jacobi for them. For example, when saying that abortion had been outlawed by nearly all states by 1880, she writes, "None confronted the fact that when embryos and fetuses were protected as fully human, the lives of women became dehumanized and incidental."

Maybe Dr. Jacobi believed this and maybe she didn't. This woman lost two young children. She may not have shared the belief that human life at any stage is disposable. While I would like to believe that Dr. Jacobi valued life at all its stages, my point is that I can't know from the information given in the book. Perhaps the author has more information on this topic that she did not include.

"The Cure for Women" was a well-written book and I enjoyed it. Some biographies bog down at some point; this one did not.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for this advance reader's copy. This is my honest review.

The Cure for Women By Lydia Reeder is one of the most fascinating non-fiction books i have read in a while. I felt that the research was well done. Reading about Mary Jacobi and her trying to actually research the woman body to progress womans healthcare unlike her male colleagues just making things up as they went along which caused so much pain to women. I realized just how little men thought of women back in those times not that times have really changed all that much. The author did a wonderful job.

this was good!! I feel like I learned a whole lot. my only critique would be that it felt like the author lost the plot at times? like the book would get side tracked with giving full explanations about people who weren't the main point of the book.

Overall, would recommend

If you enjoy historical nom-fiction and learning about women throughout history, you will love this book, particularly if you enjoy medical history. The author did an excellent job of explaining the journey of women in medicine and all that they had to go through.

nonfiction, historical-figures, historical-places-events, historical-research, history-and-culture, gynecology, medical-doctor, medical-history, medical-perspective, medical-practice, midwife*****

Self-importance and fear of change kept women's health care at risk for far too long. The change was hard won by the most brave and adamant and yet we still have work to do, especially those of us who are still discriminated against as "Old White Women". This excellent text gives an in depth study of the work done by the few for the benefit of the many in women's health.
I requested and received a free temporary EARC from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley. THANK YOU