I found this little gem a few years back at the Schlesinger Library (pardon the poor photography).
The library didn’t end up having much on Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi’s communications concerning infertility and reproductive health, which is what I was looking for, but it did have this excerpt from an obituary written about Jacobi on June 13, 1906 and published in the Boston Herald. Apparently Dr. Jacobi was so accomplished as a medical professional, and this was so unusual for a woman in the nineteenth-century U.S., that “a great many people who watched her career thought she ought to have been born a man.”
Dr. Jacobi’s legacy would help pave the way for many other accomplished, female doctors in the years to come. Read more about her from the National Library of Medicine.
