Mary Dixon Jones

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Mary Dixon Jones

Casebook Message Boards: General Discussion: Medical / Forensic Discussions: Mary Dixon Jones

Author: chris scott Wednesday, 05 February 2003 - 12:10 pm
I have come across some interesting accounts that reminded me of Wynne Baxter's testimony about an American seeking "specimens" for a forthcoming publication. The intresting aspect is thst during 1888 and 1889 there was a high profile press campaign taking place in the American press, specifically in the Brooklyn Star, on the subject of gynaecological surgery. This centred around a highly successful surgeon called Dr Mary Dixon Jones. One extract had this resume: " Dr. Jones was a pioneering gynecological surgeon with impeccable credentials. She trained at prestigious medical schools. She performed the first successful total hysterectomy on a patient with fibroid tumors and conducted some one hundred to three hundred laparotomies over the course of her surgical career. She published fifty-seven articles in leading medical journals. Her practice was so successful that she was earning several times more money than her male colleagues in 1889." This last comment made me wonder is some more unscrupulous male colleague was the moving force behind Baxter's American "researcher". The timing seems very coincidental when such a high profile press campaign was going on in America. An outline can be read in a book review at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/20.1/br_11.html If I find wnything more on this I will post it here Chris S
Author: chris scott Wednesday, 05 February 2003 - 12:18 pm
Re the above it appears Jones actually went to trial: "In 1889 well-known American gynaecological surgeon Mary Dixon Jones wastried for manslaughter, resulting from what prosecutors alleged were botched and unnecessary operations. In her analysis of this sensational trial and theequally sensational libel trial that followed Jones's acquittal, Professor Morantz-Sanchez examines the struggle of this surgical innovator to succeed in themale world of a new and controversial medical speciality" www.anu.edu.au/mac/community/lectures/ 2002/MorantzSanchez2002.pdf

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