Book Review

Regina Morantz-Sanchez and Deborah Kuhn McGregor each focus on an individual gynecologist and tell a history that expands our knowledge of gender, race, and power in nineteenth-century America. Both physicians were well known in the nineteenth century as pioneers in gynecological surgery. Both were transplanted southerners who practiced and made their fame in New York. Both were controversial figures in their own time. One, however, is still remembered and revered as the "father of American gynecology," while the other was rebuked and forgotten. The first, Dr. J. Marion Sims, is the subject of Deborah Kuhn McGregor's study. That the second physician would have to be dubbed a "mother" of gynecology rather than a "father" is part of the story of Dr. Mary Dixon Jones and, as Morantz-Sanchez demonstrates, part of why Dixon Jones disappeared from historical memory.	1
J. Marion Sims was honored for devising the technique to close the shameful, painful, and heretofore permanent vesico-vaginal fistulas resulting from childbirth. The surgery that became routine was first perfected, however, after years of practice in the 1840s on several enslaved African American women who submitted to experimental surgery on a daily basis. McGregor spotlights how the specialty of gynecology rested on the availability of enslaved African American women to serve as subjects for repeated surgical experiments.	2
In 1855, reformers invited Sims to practice in the new Woman's Hospital of New York. There, McGregor shows, Sims had the good fortune to be supported by wealthy female reformers who sought cures for themselves as well as the indigent. Sims and his colleagues, however, believed that the hospital and the patients were theirs. In the 1870s they performed unauthorized surgeries and ignored their patients' privacy by bringing in dozens of students and practitioners to observe the surgeries. Twenty years after he began, tensions exploded with the Board of Lady Managers, and Sims resigned. Although McGregor's prose is often awkward, her reinterpretation of Sims and gynecology is important. Sims did not heroically solve a surgical problem alone; advances in gynecological surgery built on both the suffering of women who served as clinical subjects and the finances and work of female reformers who built specialty hospitals.	3
In Conduct Unbecoming a Woman, Morantz-Sanchez brilliantly uses a newspaper exposé of questionable surgical practices and front-page newspaper coverage of the subsequent manslaughter and libel trials to investigate the history of medicine and gynecology, the rise of the middle-class city, and the role of women in the public sphere. The story begins with the Brooklyn Eagle's in-depth coverage of Dixon Jones in 1888–1889 and 1892. Morantz-Sanchez has uncovered another overlooked late-nineteenth-century medical exposé, which, like the contemporaneous investigation of New York's insane asylum, the Chicago abortion exposé, and coverage of the "Jack the Ripper" murders in London (which invoked evil gynecological surgeons), underlines the importance of medical matters, especially those featuring female sexuality, to the new journalism of the 1880s and 1890s. Each of those stories provided a way for the press and its (excited) readers to talk and read about sex and female bodies while proclaiming their devotion to the public good and the health of women, mothers, and children.	. . .