Conduct Unbecoming a Woman

Two sensational trials, the first for manslaughter, the second for libel, gripped the city of Brooklyn at the end of the ninetheenth century. In 1892 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle began detailing a history of midnight hearses and botched surgeries performed by a scalpel-eager female surgeon, Mary Dixon Jones. What Morantz-Sanchez unravels is a classic whodunit of history. From the patients' bedsides to the operating room, from the news-room to the courthouse, Morantz-Sanchez questions the evidence, recreates motives, and above all uses the trial and medical practice of Dixon Jones to tell a gripping narrative of a remarkable female surgeon operating at the very forefront of American science and medicine and the risks run by both patients and surgeons at the origins of gynaecological surgery.