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girls, especially when this was undertaken during the period of menstruation. 21 In
her 1877 paper ‘The question of rest for women during menstruation’ Mary Putnam
Jacobi (Female College of Pennsylvania, 1864), an American physician, argued
against Clarke’s notions that menstruation made a role for women in the medical
profession impossible. Jacobi suggested that menstruation and education were
compatible and used both statistical analysis and experimental methods to back up
her arguments. Her essay, submitted anonymously, won the Boylston Prize at
Harvard University. 22
We may gain further insight into contemporary attitudes towards women in medicine
from a letter entitled ‘A lady on lady doctors’ which appeared in the Lancet in 1870.
The writer used the pen-name ‘Mater’ but it is unclear whether the author was
actually female. Mater’s letter opens by arguing that ‘No woman, in any dangerous
crisis calling for calm nerve and prompt action, would trust her self in the hands of a
woman’. 23 The idea that women doctors did not possess the ‘calm nerve’ required in
times of crisis was a common argument put forward by those against women in
medicine at the time. It was bound up in Victorian ideology that men were more
rational-thinking and sensible than women, who were traditionally viewed as being
flighty, hysterical and irrational. 24 Women’s very physical natures were also
attacked, with Mater arguing that physically, women were not fit to be doctors
because they were lacking ‘the coolness and strength of nerves’ required to be a
doctor. Mater also remarked that ‘the constitutional variations of the female system,
at the best are uncertain and not to be relied upon’. 25 Likewise, in October, 1873, an
article in The Irish Times commented on the unsuitability of women for the medical
profession on account of their lack of ‘firmness, promptness of decision, and
21 Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi and the politics of medicine in nineteenth-century
America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp.122-3.
22 Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi, p.126.
23 ‘A lady on lady doctors’, Lancet, May 7 th , 1870, p.680.
24 See, for example, Elaine Showalter, The female malady: women, madness and English
culture, 1830-1980, (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1987) for a history of nineteenth and
twentieth century perceptions of women’s natures which influenced their psychiatric
treatment.
25 ‘A lady on lady doctors’, p.680.
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