This article examines the medical activism of the New York physician Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), to illustrate the problems of gender and science at the center of the vivisection debate in late nineteenth-century America. In the post-Civil War era, individuals both inside and outside the medical community considered vivisection to be a controversial practice. Physicians divided over the value of live animal experimentation, while reformers and activists campaigned against it. Jacobi stepped into the center of the controversy and tried to use her public defense of experimentation to the advantage of women in the medical profession. Her advocacy of vivisection was part of her broader effort to reform medical education, especially at women's institutions. It was also a political strategy aimed at associating women with scientific practices to advance a women's rights agenda. Her work demonstrates how debates over women in medicine and science in medicine, suffrage, and experimentation overlapped at a critical moment of historical transition.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans visited phrenological practitioners. Some clients were true believers, who consulted phrenology to choose an occupation, select a marriage partner and raise children. But, as this article demonstrates, many others consumed phrenology as an ‘experiment’, testing its validity as they engaged its practice. Consumers of ‘practical phrenology’ subjected themselves to examinations often to test the phrenologist and his practice against their own knowledge of themselves. They also tested whether phrenology was true, according to their own beliefs about race and gender. While historians have examined phrenology as a theory of the mind, we know less about its ‘users’ and how gender, race and class structured their engagement. Based on extensive archival research with letters and diaries, memoirs and marginalia, as well as phrenological readings, this study reveals how a continuum of belief existed around phrenology, from total advocacy to absolute denunciation, with lots of room for acceptance and rejection in between. Phrenologists’ notebooks and tools of salesmanship also show how an experimental environment emerged where phrenologists themselves embraced a culture of testing. In an era of what Katherine Pandora has described as ‘epistemological contests’, audiences confronted new museums, performances and theatres of natural knowledge and judged their validity. This was also true for phrenology, which benefited from a culture of contested authority. As this article reveals, curiosity, experimentation and even scepticism among users actually helped keep phrenology alive for decades.
This article explores the production and consumption of phrenological knowledge for and by middle‐class women in the USA during the early and middle decades of the 19th century. At a time when science itself had few boundaries, women became readers, consumers, proselytizers and practitioners of this knowledge system, outside of a scientific academy. This paper argues that phrenological beliefs about sex differences enabled and encouraged women to be users. Phrenology allowed women to negotiate gender and by encouraging followers to ‘know thyself,’ phrenology blurred the lines of expertise, creating a fluid interplay between users and producers of knowledge. This article then shows how categories of women users–practitioners, consumers and feminists–implemented or rejected elements of phrenology as they sought to affirm or amend prescribed gender roles. As the industrial economy seemed to divide public and private, production and consumption, masculine and feminine, phrenology allowed women and men to stand within and between these binaries. At the same time, some women used phrenology to classify themselves and others in a socio‐natural hierarchy and further engrained scientific racism in American culture.
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