Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn

In the winter of 1892, Dr. Mary Amanda Dixon Jones sued the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for libel. The suit stemmed from a series of articles that questioned Dixon Jones's ethics, honesty, and abilities as a surgeon; so inflammatory were they that two manslaughter indictments and eight malpractice suits followed their publication. Exonerated on all counts, Dixon Jones sought restitution from her journalistic accusers. Conduct Unbecoming a Woman is the story of that now-forgotten trial, as compelling as any modern courtroom drama.

In America, heavily publicized court trials often serve as bellwethers of coming social change. The legal battles of Mary Amanda Dixon Jones helped both to define the role of women physicians at the end of the 19th century and to legitimize the field of gynecology within the medical establishment. But Conduct Unbecoming a Woman is not only a medical/legal drama; it's also a tale of a city, Brooklyn, desperately seeking to retain its cosmopolitan identity as nearby Manhattan encroaches, plus a look at the newspaper business in the era of yellow journalism. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, a professor at the University of Michigan, is an expert on the historical role of women in medicine, having explored the subject in two previous books, In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians and Sympathy and Science. --Patrizia DiLucchio