Book Review

This is the story of a crusading newspaper, a surgeon, and two trials. In the spring of 1889, the Brooklyn Eagle ran a series of articles alleging mismanagement and abuse at the Woman's Hospital of Brooklyn, including a bogus board of trustees, a history of financial mismanagement, and a medical staff that existed on paper only. In a lurid expose, the paper described mysterious deaths, bodies spirited away at night, patients undergoing unwanted surgery and suffering postoperative neglect. The articles accused the hospital's founder, Dr. Mary Dixon Jones, of fraud, greed, ambition, and indifference to her patients well-being. As a result, the Brooklyn district attorney filed manslaughter charges against Dr. Jones. The 1890 trial focused on postoperative neglect--did the release of the patient soon after surgery hasten her death? If so, who was to blame for the patient's trip home on a cold winter night, her doctor or her family? After a quick trial and an exonerating verdict, Dr. Jones sued the Eagle for libel. The 1892 trial provided a riveting spectacle of competing expert witnesses, dramatic testimony by aggrieved and appreciative patients, and an extraordinary performance by the plaintiff, who lost the case.	1
Dr. Jones was a pioneering gynecological surgeon with impeccable credentials. She trained at prestigious medical schools. She performed the first successful total hysterectomy on a patient with fibroid tumors and conducted some one hundred to three hundred laparotomies over the course of her surgical career. She published fifty-seven articles in leading medical journals. Her practice was so successful that she was earning several times more money than her male colleagues in 1889.	2
At the heart of Jones's legal difficulties, Morantz-Sanchez writes, was the state of gynecology as a specialty, the gendered nature of medical professionalism, and Jones's strategy for carving out a professional niche. By 1900, gynecologists had created a specialty of skilled experts, founded two national societies, established two journals, generated a body of pathological work, and begun to train specialists in medical schools and hospitals. The specialty was riven, however, by divisions having to do with therapeutics, the relationship between pathology and surgery, views of the female body, and normative relationships between patients and physicians. At sixty-two in 1890, Dr. Jones was an anomaly, a woman who rejected the gender-segregated networks and holistic approach of women doctors; embraced the pathology studies and surgical treatments of younger men; sought out male mentors and publicity; but rejected prevailing theories about the innate sickliness of the female body.	3
Morantz-Sanchez argues that this trial influenced a profession struggling with such questions as when to operate, what to tell patients about their condition, what therapeutics to employ, how to judge operative and diagnostic competence in colleagues, and what role pathology should play in the diagnosis and treatment of disease? Surgical decision making and professional self-regulation rose to the top of the professional agenda in a context in which patients were increasingly litigating the answers to these questions. I would have appreciated more discussion about the impact of the trial on patients' expectations of the law as mediator and regulator.	4
While unpacking the subtext of the Jones trials with regard to the practice of medicine, the growth of gynecology as a specialty and the role of gender in professionalization, and while establishing the context of the trial in a city's search for identity and a newspaper's self-conscious promotion, this book is less clear on connections between law and society. Morantz-Sanchez does root the courtroom narratives crafted by both plaintiff and defendant to sentimental tropes of womanliness. But where Morantz-Sanchez sees competing sentimental narratives, I see the Eagle drawing upon gothic tropes of horror and mystery in the mad scientist, the maniac with a knife, and the unnatural woman's inexplicable betrayal of her female nature, her profession, and her sisters. One can sense the horror of Dr. Jones leaving the witness box to remove specimens from jars and hold them out to a recoiling jury while lecturing them on tissue abnormalities. While Morantz-Sanchez notes the refrain of science perverted, she says only that "though Americans tended to exhibit more faith in science and technology than their English counterparts, an awareness of the dark side of science was not wholly absent from popular consciousness . . ." (207). I would argue that it is precisely because Americans place such faith in science that the mad doctor haunts the American imagination, and because we equate female with nature in our construction of gender, the perversion of the power to heal by a female physician is all the more horrifying and inexplicable, and she the more monstrous and dangerous.	5
As a trial story, questions remain. For example, Judge Willard Bartlett instructed the jury that the plaintiff was entitled to damages in connection with four allegations that, as a matter of law, the Eagle had not demonstrated: that she had performed an abortion, that she had mistreated two female patients, and that she had sought to solicit students in her Bible class for experimental surgery. It remained for the jury to determine whether the damages should be nominal or substantial. When the jury first retired, they split over who had won the case, six voting for the newspaper and five for Dr. Jones. Deadlocked, the foreman asked the judge to excuse the panel. Bartlett refused. Deliberations resumed with jurors polling themselves hourly. The jury was ready to retire for the night when they were ordered into court at midnight. After thirty-seven hours of debate and with ten minutes to prepare for their appearance, the jury delivered a verdict for the defense. What happened? Morantz-Sanchez passes over the incident.	6
One reason may have to do with her sources. The most complete coverage of the libel trial was made by the defendant. The Brooklyn Eagle was not interested in probing the deliberations but rather in celebrating the verdict. It is clear from the text that the newspaper summarized testimony and arguments and editorialized as it reported. Morantz-Sanchez draws no attention to this methodological problem and adopts the newspaper's characterizations. For example, she attributes to the defense attorney Albert Lamb vivid imagery and forceful language, while describing the plaintiff's attorney Stephen Baldwin as lifeless (190). The problem goes beyond description, however, to matters of causation and analysis. In singling out the testimony of Dr. Henry Clarke Coe, a gynecological surgeon, the Eagle reported that there was (before 1889), in popular acceptation, a craze for the sort of operation involved in this case, among a certain class of physicians, and that operations were performed then in cases in which no gynecologist would think of operating now without long palliative treatment. The Eagle asserted that Coe's testimony emphasized the strongly conservative turn of the practice since 1889, when the attention of the profession was so pointedly turned upon the Jones methods. Morantz-Sanchez draws the conclusion that "Here we have evidence not only of shifting guidelines, but of the possibility that the Dixon Jones affair actually helped catalyze some of these changes" (186). But do we? Or is this the conclusion of a newspaper aggrandizing itself as having achieved its goal of protecting the public by focusing attention on medical wrongs? The medical profession, it implied, has testified to the importance of our reportage. Perhaps the paper also hoped to enhance its credibility in the eyes of the reading public at this point in the libel case.	7
Such concerns aside, this is a fascinating book and well worth reading, particularly by those interested in the history of medicine and women.	8
Lee Chambers-Schiller University of Colorado, Boulder

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