Jacob!

ister against the protests of the faculty, and on
June 24 passed her first test with the verdict
"very satisfactory." The precedent admitted a
second woman, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett, an Eng-
lish practising physician, who, hastening her
work, was able to take her degree before her
friend. Mary Putnam thus found herself, at her
graduation in July 1871, the second woman doc-
tor of medicine on the registers of the £cole.
She received the highest mark granted by the
faculty, together with the second prize for her
thesis. Having pursued her studies through the
siege of Paris and the disorders of the Commune,
she published in Sminer's Monthly (August
1871) an able account of the French leaders
brought forward by the fall of the Empire and
the establishment of the Republic. That year
she contributed to the Medical Record the last
of a series of nineteen letters on "Medical Mat-
ters in Paris/' which she had begun in 1867.

Her own education secured, she aspired to
win opportunity in medicine for other women.
She returned to New York in the fall of 1871
and became professor in the new Woman's Medi-
cal College of the New York Infirmary, founded
by her friend, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell [#.#.],
where for the sixteen ensuing years she was to
lecture on materia medica and therapeutics. At
the same time she entered on her long and dis-
tinguished private practice. Her Paris achieve-
ment brought her election in November to the
Medical Society of the County of New York, of
which she was the second woman member. To
its president, Dr. Abraham Jacobi \_q.v,,], she
was married July 22, 1873. On the opening of
the Post-Graduate Medical School she accepted
the chair of children's diseases which she held
for two years. Brilliant in diagnosis, thorough
in her scholarship, she "came to be known not
only as the leading woman physician of her gen-
eration, but as belonging in the first group, ir-
respective of sex" (Life, p. x). A born leader,
full of fire and magnetism, dowered with humor
and sympathy which tempered her ruthless in-
sistence on relative values and her downright
devotion to truth, by her vision and her stub-
born courage she opened many doors to women,
widening their scientific outlook, and helped so
to raise the standard at the Woman's Medical
College that students could be graduated only
when adequately equipped for their work. Dur-
ing the campaign that opened Johns Hopkins
Medical School to women, she contributed ably
to a symposium on women in medicine (Cen-
tury, February 1891). Possessing a delightful
literary style, she might "undoubtedly have se-
cured a well-earned prestige as a writer" (Life,

Jacobi

p. viii). She educated her little daughter large-
ly in accordance with theories of her own. In
addition to her lecturing, her private practice,
hospital attendance at the Infirmary, and dis-
pensary service at Mount Sinai and St. Mark's
hospitals, she prepared more than a hundred
important papers for medical societies. Her ag-
gressive altruism expressed itself further in work
for American Indians and the negro, and in
support of the Consumers' League. She was one
of the founders of the League for Political Edu-
cation. For suffrage she struck an effective
blow when before the constitutional convention
at Albany in 1894 she made a masterly address
which she later expanded into the volume, "Com-
mon Sense?' Applied to Woman Suffrage (1894),
which was reprinted and used as a campaign
document by New York suffragists in the final
struggle in 1915.

She had the defects of her qualities. Intel-
lectually a Frenchwoman in the range of schol-
arship, she could never adapt herself to limita-
tions imposed on American medical instruction
in her day by the meager preparation of the
students, but expanded her courses beyond the
receptivity of her classes. Friction on this ac-
count caused her to retire from her professor's
chair in 1888. Herself unstinting in service,
ready to throw herself into any work that needed
to be done, she was quicker to criticize than to
understand the absence of instant cooperation
from others. She had no patience with the lit-
tlenesses of social life, though she had hosts of
real friends on both sides of the ocean. She died
of an obscure disease (which she studied pains-
takingly) after four years of progressive in-
validism. Her publications, in addition to those
previously mentioned, include De la graisse neur
tre et de les acides gras (Paris thesis, 1871);
The Question of Rest for Women during Mens-
truation (1877), awarded the Boylston Prize in
1876; The Value of Life (1879); Essays on
Hysteria, Brain-Tumor, and Some Other Cases
of Nervous Disease (1888) -t Physiological Notes
on Primary Education and the Study of Lan-
guage (1889); "Women in Medicine," in Wo-
men's Work in America (1891), edited by Annie
N. Meyer; Stories and Sketches (1907). She
edited Dr. Abraham Jacobi's Infant Diet (1874)
and J. A. C Uffelmann's Manual of the Do-
mestic Hygiene of the Child (1891).

[Life and Letters of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1925),
ed. by Ruth Putnam; Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D., a
Pathfinder in Medicine, with Selections from Her Writ-
ings and a Complete Bibliography (1925) ', Victor Rob-
inson, "Mary Putnam Jacobi," Medic, Life, July 1928;
Jour. Am. Medic. Asso., June 23, 1906; N. Y. Medic.
Jour.f June 16, 1906; Woman's Jour. (Boston), June
16, 1906; N. Y. Times, June 12, 1906.] M.B.H.

565