Mary Putnam Jacobi's Influential Arguments from Biology

Abstract

Over the course of her illustrious career, Doctor Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906) persuasively challenged the biologically-determined, sexually-polarized theories that are still considered essential to the medical orthodoxy of her day. Inspired by her clinical research and professional observations, Putnam Jacobi sought to supplant the flawed arguments of some of her more famous colleagues with her own vision of physiology, which underscored a unifying similarity among all living beings. The concepts of motility and vibrant materiality frequently operate in her writings as rich metaphors for healthily functioning individual and social bodies. Taking her influential views into account would help us develop less settled, more complex, and more fully historicist understandings of how both medicine and biology were constituted at the time. In turn, making this more robust medical dialogue the framework for our interpretations of fictional depictions of medical women helps bring hitherto underappreciated thematic and formal elements to light.