Two sensational trials, the first for manslaughter, the second for libel, gripped the city of Brooklyn at the end of the ninetheenth century. In 1892 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle began detailing a history of midnight hearses and botched surgeries performed by a scalpel-eager female surgeon, Mary Dixon Jones. What Morantz-Sanchez unravels is a classic whodunit of history. From the patients' bedsides to the operating room, from the news-room to the courthouse, Morantz-Sanchez questions the evidence, recreates motives, and above all uses the trial and medical practice of Dixon Jones to tell a gripping narrative of a remarkable female surgeon operating at the very forefront of American science and medicine and the risks run by both patients and surgeons at the origins of gynaecological surgery.

When first published in 1985, Sympathy and Science was hailed as a groundbreaking study of women in medicine. It remains the most comprehensive history of American women physicians available. Tracing the participation of women in the medical profession from the colonial period to the present, Regina Morantz-Sanchez examines women's roles as nurses, midwives, and practitioners of folk medicine in early America; recounts their successful struggles in the nineteenth century to enter medical schools and found their own institutions and organizations; and follows female physicians into the twentieth century, exploring their efforts to sustain significant and rewarding professional lives without sacrificing the other privileges and opportunities of womanhood. In a new preface, the author surveys recent scholarship and comments on the changing world of women in medicine over the past two decades. Despite extraordinary advances, she concludes, women physicians continue to grapple with many of the issues that troubled their predecessors. |First published in 1985 to wide acclaim, this book is the most comprehensive history of American women physicians available, covering the period from colonial times to the present. This edition includes a new preface that reflects on the changing world of women in medicine over the past two decades.