“The Cure for Women”: A precocious girl is drawn toward medicine ...Middle East

This book is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for History.

Awakening

New York City, 1860

Seventeen-year-old Mary Corinna Putnam adjusted the tie on the waist apron of her floor-length muddy-gray uniform as she brushed by the other busy nurses, all with their hair pinned up beneath white caps. Elizabeth Blackwell, director of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, had recently returned from a monthslong trip to England, and she made sure that their uniforms were just like the one worn by her new friend Florence Nightingale.

Because her chestnut hair was very thick and she had a sensitive scalp, Mary refused to wear the bonnet-like headpiece of her nursing uniform. Besides, she was not really a nurse, just a recent high-school graduate who was spending a few months at the infirmary to learn about medicine.

The eldest of eleven children, Mary was the daughter of publishing magnate George Palmer Putnam and his wife, Victorine Haven Putnam. Her Putnam ancestors had arrived in New England in 1642 and were, famously, among the notorious accusers in the 1692 Salem witch tragedy. Mary had been interested in science and medicine for as long as she could remember. At age nine, she discovered a recently deceased rat in the family barn and asked her mother if she could slice open its abdomen to observe its heart, lungs, and stomach contents. Disgusted, her mother forbade her to touch the disease-carrying animal. But Mary, who also showed a talent for literature, writing, and teaching, remained fascinated with animal dissection.

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In 1854, when Mary was twelve years old, her father published Elizabeth Blackwell’s first book, The Laws of Life. Its success allowed Blackwell to build her practice and got her invited to Putnam family gatherings. Putnam regularly published single women authors. His inclination to help these “literary domestics” was also good business, since their books had a growing audience of literate middle-class women.

Like most Victorians, Putnam considered the practice of medicine to be an improper profession for ladies. He had published Elizabeth’s book because he liked her ideas about hygiene and public health, not because she was a trained doctor. Even so, because he admired and loved his gifted daughter more than he disapproved of women doctors, he let Mary work at the clinic. But when he observed the Spartan living conditions at the infirmary, it took great restraint on his part to keep from escorting his daughter straight back home. During her time there, Mary slept in a tiny room on the top floor of the infirmary with another teenage girl who was also interested in medicine. The Blackwell sisters and three or four interns—recent graduates of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania—lived in the attic rooms as well. They all shared a tiny bathroom the size of Mary’s closet at home.

Starting at 8:00 a.m. every day except Sunday, dozens of patients, all women and children, began lining up for care at the dispensary, an outpatient clinic for the poor and working class. Some had fevers; some had infected wounds, dysentery, or croup. Others needed gynecological care or were experiencing the first hints of pregnancy. If they were able, the patients paid a trivial sum for their care, but payment was never expected. The annual report from 1861 for the infirmary counted 4,792 patients.

After days spent on her feet working in the dispensary, Mary felt exhausted, but she finally got used to the smell. Dozens of patients waiting together, especially in the warmer months, stirred up pungent odors. Soap and hot water were luxury items to those living on the poverty line. The sicker patients often stank like rotted pumpkins or wool socks dipped in sour milk. The younger ones carried the odor of their children’s soiled diapers. Those who worked at the factories smelled like their products: wood pulp, linseed oil, or tobacco. The ones from the nearby fat-rendering establishment reeked of roast mutton.

One day, Emily Blackwell was in charge of seeing patients, and Mary was assisting. One woman was so pregnant that her growing stomach had torn through the seams of her worn cotton dress. She had tried to cover up her fierce body odor with the scent of bergamot, but Mary still turned away and dabbed a bit of camphor beneath her nose. Many of those who worked at the clinic kept a bottle of the pungent oil in their skirt pockets.

The woman nervously dipped her chin and lowered her gaze, apologizing for not bringing along her marriage license. Dr. Emily informed her that, unlike the other New York hospitals, the infirmary did not require a pregnant woman to have one. The young woman’s face relaxed and her fists unclenched with relief.

In the examination room, Mary recorded the woman’s name, height, weight, exact symptoms, and any medications prescribed. After a brief examination, Emily admitted the woman to the hospital. Mary then went to find the next patient, and the next.

“The Cure for Women”

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Today, Mary was filled with anticipation. Emily had invited her to observe a surgical procedure that only promising interns were allowed to attend. Elizabeth Blackwell herself had called Mary “a very talented girl.” And her praise did not come easily.

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was thinking about opening her own medical school. She envisioned a three-year course of study even more stringent than the medical colleges that men attended. Her lectures would build progressively from year to year, and a board of examiners would test students yearly. Her school would be the first ever to feature a professor of hygiene—Elizabeth herself. She wanted Mary to be her first student. Mary told Elizabeth that she was not sure of her plans but would think about her generous offer. Throughout Mary’s life, her intelligence combined with excellent manners and a charming demeanor attracted mentors and opened doors closed to most other girls.

Growing up, Mary was always the cleverest person in the room. Although she was nicknamed “Minnie” because of her size, her view of the world was as tall, wide, and clear as if she were gazing from a mountaintop. Her parents encouraged Mary’s vivid imagination. Evenings at the Putnam house were spent entertaining professors, ministers, scientists, and authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. One friend of the family wrote that “you would see Thackeray one night, and Lowell another; and run the risk of being asked (as I was) by George P. Marsh, just back from foreign duty, ‘what I thought of the state of Europe?’ Poor young me!—I didn’t know Europe had a ‘state’!”

Mary, aged ten at the time, would put a sign on the front door just before the first arrivals that read “Nobody admitted who cannot talk.” One time, though, her overconfidence almost killed her. Mary and her brothers and sisters liked to play in the shallow parts of a nearby lake, sometimes paddling out on boards. One day, Mary kept paddling. She felt strong and brave, like a soldier at sea. She heard her sister shout a warning that she was out beyond her depth. Mary retorted that her sister was mistaken, and to prove her point, she rolled off her board. She was startled to discover that she had been wrong. She tried to push upward through the murky water but couldn’t reach the surface. She tried two more times before realizing that she was drowning.

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“Tomorrow I shall be thrown upon the shore, just like the drowned kittens,” she thought. She pictured herself stretched out limp and unmoving on the sand. But as she was going down for the fourth time, someone lifted her out of the water and carried her, coughing and sputtering, to shore. Her rescuer, a tall workman from the nearby window-glass factory, could easily wade through the very water in which she had been drowning.

When he set her down on the sand, her legs felt wobbly, her head was spinning, and she almost blacked out—an astonishing fact, because she had never fainted in her life. Seeing that she was not well, her rescuer carried her home and all the way up to her bed, where she fell asleep immediately. When she finally woke up to find the family doctor smiling down at her and her mother holding her hand, she did not feel shocked by her life-threatening experience, only flabbergasted that she had been wrong. To Mary’s chagrin, her mother kept her in bed for the rest of the day. When her father came home from work and heard the story of her near drowning, she saw the fear and emotion in his eyes.

The next day, her father purchased a handsome silver watch, and he and Mary walked to the factory, where he presented her rescuer with the gift as a token of his deep gratitude. Still confused by her shocking error in judgment, ten-year-old Mary could not understand what the man had done to deserve this gratitude. As she grew older, though, she made a serious effort to overcome her selfishness. At age fifteen, she wrote to a friend, “But I am so unaccustomed to be with any people but those whom I like . . .  that I am entirely unfitted for general society.” She looked to religion for guidance and grew closer to her paternal grandmother by promising to accept God’s will and join her grandmother’s evangelical Baptist church. Mary was searching for a touchstone, something that would inspire her heart and drive her forward. She hoped that it would be God.

Until 1857, the Putnams were moderately religious Episcopalians. While George Putnam’s mother had always preached the Gospel to her grandchildren, historically, his family had devoted more of their energy to literary, political, and cultural interests. But this all changed when the economy collapsed in the Panic of 1857. Many businesses at the time, including Putnam’s publishing company, had overextended credit. His financial manager had also used the company’s funds for personal investments. When the man’s embezzlements came to light, he drowned himself. Forced to declare bankruptcy, Mary’s previously secular father sought consolation in religion. The 1857 revivals in downtown Manhattan, which attracted struggling businessmen eager for spiritual guidance in a time of desperate uncertainty,  came to be known as a “masculine millennium” and the “great awakening.”

The revivals were also popular because of their youthful, charismatic leader, Abner Kingman Nott, who projected a robust, manly sincerity in his Christian spirit. The Putnam family traveled from their home in the Bronx to Lower Manhattan every Sunday to hear Nott preach. Through his earnest eloquence, dignified bearing, and upbeat sermons, the young pastor of the First Baptist Church on Broome Street “ushered the entire Putnam family into the revivals.”

At age sixteen, Mary developed a crush on the charming Pastor Nott. During his visits to their home in the Bronx, the two spent hours together discussing her spiritual development and other theological topics. She felt closer to God while talking to Nott and hoped for a spiritual enlightenment that would also reveal her true purpose in life.

One day, he did not appear for their talks, and the family soon received news that Abner Nott, age twenty-five, had drowned while swimming with friends in the waters between New Jersey and Staten Island. Heartbroken, Mary felt the shock and sorrow for Nott that she never felt for her own escape from a watery death. She began questioning her faith and soon left the church altogether. Instead of religion, she focused on her studies and wrote essays critical of the constraints placed on women. She expressed growing frustration with society and the “cult of true womanhood.”

Mary’s father encouraged his daughter’s brilliance and adored her for it, but  there was a limit to even his progressive attitude.  That threshold was reached when Mary became interested in medicine. Even though George Putnam had helped single women like Elizabeth Blackwell by publishing their writings, he did not want that life for his daughter. He directed Mary toward proper feminine professions. Unlike the “spinster” Blackwell sisters, many women who were teachers and writers also attracted husbands and raised children. Putnam feared that if Mary  became a doctor—considered to be a highly masculine profession—her soft femininity would harden, her ability to have children would diminish, and he would lose his wonderful daughter. He had reluctantly encouraged Mary’s apprenticeship at the Blackwells’ infirmary because he expected her to become bored with doctoring.

But Mary’s fascination with medicine grew even stronger. At the procedure that Mary had been invited to observe, she watched closely as Emily performed surgery. Standing a few feet away from the operating table, she could imagine herself holding the scalpel, cutting through flesh, and risking the life of her patient to cure her pain. The whole thing took nerves of steel. Unlike male surgeons, who reused their white surgical aprons over and over until they were stiff with dried gore, Emily wore a clean white uniform for each procedure. Once the patient was sufficiently unconscious from the chloroform mask, Emily’s small hands moved quickly and accurately, and she made the incision with minimal blood spatter. When she was finished, she saved the removed specimen in a glass jar.

The next morning, Mary entered the hospital lab for the first time. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word laboratory meant a general workspace or workshop. By midcentury, the term  laboratory referred to  an institution for scientific, especially experimental, practice. The Blackwells made sure that the New York Infirmary had the most innovative equipment and processes. In addition to dozens of chemicals and hundreds of glass vials, their workroom doubtless contained at least one compound microscope. Compared to the simple microscopes comprised of a single magnifying lens, compound microscopes had two lenses that increased magnification more than a hundred times. Mary had likely peered through simple microscopes at school and observed the crisscrossed veins on leaves or the eight bulging eyes of a deceased spider. But she had never looked through a powerful, properly adjusted compound microscope at slides of human tissue. The miniature universe that appeared before her left her speechless. The hundreds of magnified cells looked like worlds within worlds. She literally stopped breathing when she realized that she was looking at the most basic form of life.

Suddenly, she was filled with a galvanizing desire to know more.

In the days and weeks that followed, she spent hours analyzing specimens in the lab. She studied the periodic table of elements and pored over biology textbooks, reading Virchow’s cellular theory, first proposed in 1855, that all cells came from existing cells. She realized that the cells that formed a woman’s body were no different than a man’s. Superficial boundaries such as those subjecting women to cloistered lives dissolved in her mind. They meant nothing. Science was freedom. She was reborn a scientist.

Lydia Reeder is the author of “Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team that Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory,” which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Willa Literary Award. Her new book, “The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine that Changed Women’s Lives Forever,” is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for History. She lives in Denver.

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