Conduet unbecoming a woman: Medicine on trail in turn of the century Brooklyn

In the spring of 1889, a burgeoning Brooklyn newspaper, the Daily Eagle, printed a series of articles that detailed a history of midnight hearses and botched operations performed by a scalped-eager female surgeon named Dr. May Dixon Jones. The ensuing avalanche of public outrage gave rise two trials-one for manslaughter and one for libel - that became a late nineteenth century sensation. Vividly recreating both trials, Regina Morantz-Sanchez provides a marvelous historical whodunit, inviting readers to sift through the evidence and evaluate the witnesses. Conduct Unbecoming a Women is as mesmerizing as an intricately crafted suspense novel. Jars of specimens and surgical mannequins became common spectacles in the courtroom, and the roughly three hundred witnesses who testified represented a fascinating social cross-section of the city's inhabitants, from humble immigrant crafts-men and seamstresses to some of New York and Brooklyn's most prestigious citizens and physician. Like many legal extravaganzas of our own time, the Mary Dixon Jones trials highlighted broader social issues in America, issues that were catalyzed by the transformation of cities - like Brooklyn - from ordered communities dominated by nineteenth-century bourgeois elites to sprawling, multi-ethnic urban landscapes. Indeed, these modernized cities were replete with industrial exploitation, class conflict, ethnic animosity, poverty, and a vastly.