JACOBI, MARY PUTNAM

(1842-1906), physician, women's rights advocate, and medical educator. Of all the women physicians who achieved distinction in the nineteenth century, Jacobi was easily the most highly respected by her male colleagues. Indeed, her professional achievements were equaled by few of either sex. Her family supported her in her career decision in spite of their reservations about the field. Her father, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, considered medical science to be a "repulsive pursuit" but nevertheless took great pride in Mary's success. He begged only that she shun the company of "strong-minded women." "Be a lady from the dotting of your i's to the color of your ribbons," he wrote to her in 1863, "and if you must be a doctor and a philosopher, be an attractive and agreeable one."

Jacobi, who appreciated her parents' remarkable tolerance of her plans, spent many long years pursuing her goals. After receiving a degree in 1863 from the New York College of Pharmacy, she attended the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, graduating a year later. She then studied clinical medicine at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Dissatisfied with the level of training in the United States, she left for France, where after much perseverance, she was admitted to the Ecole de Médecine. She received her degree in 1871 (only the second woman to do so) and was awarded high honors and a bronze medal for her thesis.

Jacobi vacillated between research and clinical medicine before she returned to New York in 1871. She set up a practice and joined the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary as professor of therapeutics and materia medica. Although she considered New York medicine inferior to that in Paris, Jacobi continued to develop as a first-rate physician and scientist. She was the first woman to be admitted to the New York Academy of Medicine and later chaired its section on neurology. She gained admission to numerous other medical societies as well and nurtured her sustained interest in research by publishing 9 books and over 120 medical articles. One of the books, The Questions of Rest for Women during Menstruation, won Harvard's esteemed Boylston Prize in 1876 in spite of its culturally charged subject.

In 1873 she married Dr. Abraham Jacobi, a German refugee who had already made a profound impact on New York medicine and is considered to be the father of the specialty of pediatrics. They formed a lively and stimulating intellectual and professional partnership.

A male member of the Pathological Society remembered Jacobi as a woman "whose knowledge of pathology was so thorough, whose range of the literature was so wide and whose criticism was so keen, fearless and just that in our discussions, we felt it prudent to shun the field of speculation to walk strictly in the path of demonstrated fact." She was especially supportive of women students, believing that high standards and rigorous training were essential if they were to find a place in the profession. Her status in the male professional world never deterred her from participating in the women's medical movement, and she remained active with the New York Infirmary and the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in several capacities. One of her last scientific works was a detailed and remarkably insightful clinical account of the onset and progress of the meningeal tumor that led to her death in 1906.

Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (1985); Rhoda Truax, The Doctors Jacobi (1952).

Regina Morantz-Sanchez

See also Feminist Movement; Medicine.