The New International Encyclopædia/Jacobi, Mary Putnam

JACOBI, Mary Putnam (1842—). An American physician, born in London, England, the daughter of George P. Putnam, of New York City. The first woman graduated from the New York College of Pharmacy, in 1862, she was also the first woman graduated from the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, in 1864. After teaching in New Orleans, and writing for a year, she went to Paris and engaged in the further study of medicine. After eighteen months passed in the hospitals of Paris, she was admitted by the Minister of Public Instruction to the Ecole de Médecine, and was graduated therefrom in 1871, receiving the second prize for her thesis. She returned to New York and began practice at once, also entering upon the duties of lecturer on therapeutics in the new Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. She was the first woman admitted to the New York medical societies and to the American Medical Association. In 1873 she was married to the physician Abraham Jacobi (q.v.). In 1881, upon the founding of the New York Post-Graduate Medical School, she became clinical professor of diseases of children. In 1874 she organized an association for the advancement of the medical education of women, of which she became president. Besides being a visiting physician to the New York Infirmary, Dr. Putnam-Jacobi has been for several years a visiting physician to Saint Mark's Hospital. She is a member of several medical societies, and a writer on many medical topics. She secured the Boylston prize of Harvard University in 1876 for an original essay. In 1891 she contributed a paper on the history of women physicians in this country to the volume “Women's Work in America,” in which, amid the bibliography of writings by American female physicians, she mentions over forty productions of her own pen. Her published works include: The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation (1877); Acute Fatty Degeneration of New-Born (1878); The Value of Life (1879); Cold Pack and Anæmia (1880); The Prophylaxis of Insanity (1881); Hysteria and Other Essays (1888); Common Sense Applied to Woman's Suffrage (1894). See Jacobi, Abraham.