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

By Regina Morantz-Sanchez

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195126246
• ISBN13: 9780195126242
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.2" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

a great academic OR recreational read

This book was recommended to me for a research project on gender and sexuality. As I read the book, I realized that it didn't overlap with my topic as much as I'd hoped; however, I couldn't put it down! Morantz-Sanchez creates a narrative that provides a necessary historical context to really understand the cases she discusses. At the same time, she keeps the narrative simple enough to really engage the reader. I found that I enjoyed "Conduct Unbecoming..." as much as--or more than--I would have if I had read it for academic purposes.

Great reading!

This book is a fabulous read. It is simultaneously a history of turn-of-the-century gynecology, a history of women, and a history of Brooklyn. It can be read as a medical murder mystery and as a very interesting cultural history -- and it deserves a wide audience. It was very refreshing to come upon a book that rejects the usual boundaries of "academic" and "non-academic" to carve out a space for clearly written, meticulously researched, smart and intriguing historical storytelling.

a great story

Morantz-Sanchez writes well and persuasively about a series of interconnected issues: medicine, the power of doctors and of patients, professional ambition, the place of women in society, Brooklyn as a community, and the power of the press and the courtroom. This book is in line with recent scholarship in cultural history, but it is by no means unwieldy or abstract. The times and tribulations of Mary Dixon Jones make for an excellent case study, especially since there are many ways to interpret the evidence. The author considers a wide variety of perspectives, including those of the patients themselves.

Gripping, Insightful and Intelligent

Through this turn-of-the-century medical mystery, Ms. Morantz-Sanchez both breathes life into a long-forgotten story and in the process illuminates some persistent themes of gender and medicine. Finally a historian is demonstrating that good storytelling and complex historical analysis are not mutually exclusive -- nor are they solely the province of Civil War and other military historians. One does NOT have to be an academic to be compelled by this engrossing book. I have given this book as a gift to medical students, Brooklynites, and all types of intelligent readers in between -- none of whom have tossed it aside in favor of Court TV.

Engagingly and flawlessly argued

Morantz-Sanchez has written a compelling account not just of the "crimes" and trial of Mary Dixon-Jones, but more importantly, it seems to me, an account of the times that allowed for the events to take place at all. Her analysis of the professionalization of gynecology, the place of surgery within that profession, and particularly the role of women within medicine is impeccable. Beyond that, however, Morantz-Sanchez offers a nuanced reading of late nineteenth-century Brooklyn, especially in comparison to its larger and more cosmopolitan neighbor, Manhattan. This analysis allows the reader to understand the relation Dixon-Jones had with her own neighbors and with the culture of Brooklyn at the time. She also does a great job situating the role that an evolving press played not only in the coverage of the "crimes" and the trial, but in the construction of Dixon-Jones' supporters and detractors. Throughout, Mary Dixon-Jones emerges as a truly fascinating character, a woman obsessed with success, a woman who knew how to get it. Conduct Unbecoming a Woman definitely is a story of "True Crime." But it is so much more than that. Marshaling a truly astounding amount of evidence in a really seamless fashion, Morantz-Sanchez shows the reader why the trial mattered, why it happened in the first place, and what it can tell us about much larger historical questions (of women professionals, of medicine at the turn of the century, of the emergence of the science of pathology, of Brooklyn and Manhattan). In that sense the book is not just entertaining (though it is that...), it's important.