Cure for Women

 

The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine THat Changed Women's Lives Forever- Lydia Reeder

St. Martin's Press

Release Date: December 3, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin’s evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty.

Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education. Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women’s bodies and lives continues.

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Once Elizabeth Blackwell broke the glass ceiling and became the first women to graduate medical school, more women demanded the chance to study medicine. In America, men did their best to prevent this so women with means traveled to Europe, getting degrees in France and returning to practice and teach other women. In The Cure For Women Lydia Reeder introduces readers to a few of these early medical pioneers and the challenges they faced, then focuses the rest of the book through Mary Putnam and her research, challenges, and advances.

Like many of the early women who were able to travel to Europe to become doctors, Putnam was from a wealthy family (she was the eldest daughter of publisher George Putnam), though money alone never smoothed all her ways. A combination of money, charm, brilliance, stubbornness, and a refusal to fail when she knew she was in the right were the characteristics needed of all of the early women doctors, and Mary had most of these in spades. 

I knew when I started this book I was going to spend a lot of it angry or fustrated by the challenges men placed in the way of women trying to reach their highest potential. I was blown away by the arrogance shown by many of the male doctors in these pages. There are doctors who treat surgery like a grand spectacle to show off their skills, doctors who refuse anesthesia to their female patients for a variety of horrific reasons. Doctors who seem to genuinely believe women aren't capable of the thought necessary for anything because of their menstral cycles, and plenty of men willing to use (and distort) Darwin's theories to promote eugenics for their own ends to control women's bodies. 

It was fascinating to watch doctors like Mary Putnam Jacobi develop theories and entire processes that we now take for granted (like surveys of patients) to begin undertanding and developing new sciences of the time- hygiene, pediatrics, and women's health and gynecology. But more interesting to me was watching them take these sciences and common sense and begin to apply them to the fight for women's rights across a large spectrum of issues, such as voting and education. Jacobi became a proponent of educating women equally to men, preferrably in equal settings, and she worked with all the big names of the era in women's suffrage to fight for the causes she believed in. 

The Cure for Women is overall a really interesting and well-written book, certainly well researched, accessible to everyone. I do wish the author had used more quotes from the writings of Jacobi and the other women involved to help us get more into their heads, but that's my only real complaint. 

For anyone interested in the development of medical science in the nineteenth century, women's education and fight for equality, or readers of Olivia Campbell's Women in White, The Cure for Women is a book to add to the TBR list!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review 

Muse of Maiden Lane

 

The Muse of Maiden Lane (The Belles of London #4)- Mimi Matthews

Berkeley/Penguin

Release Date: November 19, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis:  Stella Hobhouse is a brilliant rider, stalwart friend, skilled sketch artist—and completely overlooked. Her outmodish gray hair makes her invisible to London society. Combined with her brother’s pious restrictions and her dwindling inheritance, Stella is on the verge of a lifetime marooned in Derbyshire as a spinster. Unless she does something drastic…like posing for a daring new style of portrait by the only man who’s ever really seen her. Aspiring painter Edward “Teddy” Hayes knows true beauty when he sees it. He would never ask Stella to risk her reputation as an artist’s model but in the five years since a virulent bout of scarlet fever left him partially paralyzed, Teddy has learned to heed good fortune when he finds it. He’ll do anything to persuade his muse to pose for him, even if he must offer her a marriage of convenience.   After all, though Teddy has yearned to trace Stella’s luminous beauty on canvas since their chance meeting, her heart is what he truly aches to capture….

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The final book in Mimi Matthews' Belles of London series features Stella Hobhouse, a brave rider and friend who knows if she doesn't marry soon she'll find herself buried in the quiet countryside forever. Thanks to her odd gray hair and lively personality, she's had more trouble than her friends when it comes to finding a suitor. Thinking if men could just look past her hair to her they might give her a chance, Stella decides to be daring and dye her hair while attending a houseparty with her friend Lady Anne, since noone else will know her there. 

Edward "Teddy" Hayes is a fustrated artist who briefly met his muse at a museum, only to lose her to his blunt speech. Now he's at a house party he doesn't want to attend and only knows his sister and brother-in-law. Deciding to spend most of his time painting and hiding away to avoid people and dealing with the annoyance of his wheelchair, he's as surprised as Stella when they meet again. 

Muse is a slow burn romance very different from what readers might generally expect- both from Matthews' normal books or traditional romance in general, but I thought it worked very well. At the heart of the story, both Stella and Teddy want independence. They want to discover who they are, what they are capable of in life. While they each start off thinking they need to chart their paths separately, by the end they've discovered that love can make them stronger together. Both have wanted to be truly seen for who they are and what they are capable of beyond their physical appearance- Stella's hair and Teddy's wheelchair. Even early on it is clear (to the reader anyway) that they see each other for who they are. The question is, how long will it take them to figure it out? The suggested marriage of convenience comes late in the book, which might annoy some people. After all, traditionally you have an early marriage of convenience and then love grows from that. But I enjoyed how Matthews played with the expectations and turned the idea into something new- rather like Teddy and his fellow painters were trying to do with what we now call Impressionist art!

One of my absolute favorite things in this book is how Teddy encourages Stella to be herself. Not to be small and quiet, but to be whatever she feels she is, because once they are married they only have to please themselves. That's the kind of support I want in a partner!

This is a story of two people finding their own way, discovering friendship and strengths within themselves that allow for a beautiful, trusting partnership of a loving marriage.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

The Eagle and the Hart

 

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Hnry IV- Helen Castor

Penguin

Release Date: October 15, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, cousins born just three months apart, were ten years old when Richard became king of England. They were thirty-two when Henry deposed him and became king in his place. Now, the story behind one of the strangest and most fateful events in English history (and the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated history plays) is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed author of Blood and Roses, Helen Castor. 

Richard had birthright on his side, and a profound belief in his own God-given majesty. But beyond that, he lacked all qualities of leadership. A narcissist who did not understand or accept the principles that underpinned his rule, he was neither a warrior defending his kingdom, nor a lawgiver whose justice protected his people. Instead, he declared that “his laws were in his own mouth,” and acted accordingly. He sought to define as treason any resistance to his will and recruited a private army loyal to himself rather than the realm—and he intended to destroy those who tried to restrain him. 

Henry was everything Richard was a leader who inspired both loyalty and friendship, a soldier and a chivalric hero, dutiful, responsible, principled. After years of tension and conflict, Richard banished him and seized his vast inheritance. Richard had been crowned a king but he had become a tyrant, and as a tyrant—ruling by arbitrary will rather than established law—he was deposed by his cousin Henry, the only possible candidate to take his place. Henry was welcomed as a liberator, a champion of the people against his predecessor’s paranoid despotism. But within months he too was facing rebellion. Men knew that a deposer could in turn be deposed, and the new king found himself buffeted by unrest and by chronic ill-health until he seemed a shadow of his former self, trapped by political uncertainty and troubled by these signs that God might not, after all, endorse his actions.

 Captivating, immersive, and highly relevant to today’s times, The Eagle and the Hart is a story about what happens when a ruler prioritizes power over the interests of his own people. When a ruler demands loyalty to himself as an individual, rather than duty to the established constitution, and when he seeks to reshape reality rather than concede the force of verifiable truths. Above all, it is a story about how a nation was brought to the brink of catastrophe and disintegration—and, in the end, how it was brought back.

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I knew the basics about King Richard II and Henry IV, but not much else before reading this book, and The Eagle and the Hart  did an amazing job of explaining the how, why, and who of what I knew, what I didn't know, and all the parts in between if the controversial rule of Richard II and his shocking deposition by Henry Bolingbroke (aka King Henry IV).

This is the first of Helen Castor's books that I've read and she dis an incredible job of breaking down the complicated facts of Richard's government, Parliament, and the rebellions, wars, laws, and everything else going on at the time to make the reader understand what was happening- both from Richard's point of view and everyone else's. She sets up what Richard does at a young age so you understand where he's going as he gets older and more capable of controling things himself. The small amount I'd read before on Richard II focused a lot on scholars debating what kind of mental illnesses he might have had. Castor doesn't do anything like that. She gives his story, how he grew up, what he does and lets you decide about him for yourself. The historical sources seem to suggest he was an incredibly immature, vain, egotistical man who felt all the power belonged with him and no one could tell him what to do. Which became a serious problem for much of England.

Henry gets less of the limelight until the later part of the book, but is equally interesting. I thought studying the two men together made the book really effective and memorable.

 This is the kind of well-researched, meaty book I love to read and will read multiple times, knowing I will get more out of it each time I read it (and hopefully retain more each time). Well written and  excellent for people who know little about the time period or are just looking for a new angle on a subject they already know about, The Eagle and The Hart is just the kind of fabulous work of history I enjoy.