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Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols

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Too little is known of the advances of women in antebellum America. Mary Gove Nichols was an important and fascinating part of this scene, and she is brought to life in this interesting and well-researched biography. Nichols' personal quest for independence from a tragic marriage is agonizing, but only when she achieves such freedom does her real story begin. A writer and teacher, her move to New York City in 1845 led to her knowing some of the era's most important literary people---Poe, Bryant, N. P. Willis, Margaret Fuller, Frances Osgood, and others---and to her association with important social and scientific movements of the day---mesmerism, phrenology, Fouierism, Swedenborgianism, and especially water-cure. Criticized as an advocate for free love, Nichols toured the country, lecturing to women on such taboo subjects as female anatomy and masturbation. Her story is remarkable as is Jean Silver-Isenstadt's telling of it.

All my life, I've thought of 18th and 19th century women as uneducated homemakers, good at making quilts or helping clear the land. Mary Gove Nichols and her second husband Thomas Nichols seem so absolutely current. She was out there, giving lectures to women on their anatomy and physiology, teaching publicly about healthy sexuality and about equality in marriage. For people who just know about spa history from the novel and movie, Road to Wellville, this book will win your respect and even awe.
And this book is a great read! It will spark up any women's studies, or 19th Century American studies, or history of medicine reading list. You'll pass this one along to your friends for a great summer read as well, especially if you are going to Upstate New York, or to Antioch and Yellow Springs. Her life was filled with adventures. This really does read like a novel.

Jean Silver-Isenstadt's book is an exhaustively researched and beautifully-written biography of this prominent nineteenth-century reformer, Mary Gove Nichols, and her husband, Thomas Low Nichols. In addition to the captivating life story of Nichols, Silver-Isenstadt inlcudes rich detail of American cultural history in the narrative, and in many enjoyable detours, she rounds out the picture of Nichols and her historical context by including information about subjects as wide-ranging as other health reformers, water cure therapy, and transcendentalist writers. All of this helps us understand Nichols' central and at times path-breaking role in several intersecting reform movements of her time.
A fine historical text, this book is a very readable and engaging book for non-academics and academics alike. Great for professional and armchair historians.

The mental health care system today fills one with dread. Physicians with ties to the pharmaceutical industry, with some interest in curing you but with an eye on body materials, tissues, blood, and organs that can be harvested and sold at great profit confront us all. Reading this extremely well-written book provides a perspective at a very different moment in the history of medicine. Mary Gove Nichols advocated a wide variety of alternatives to standard medical care which, if one thinks about it, were not all that bad. They were undoubtedly far superior to what orthodox physicians prescribed at the time: blood-letting, mercury, leeches, purgatives, emetics, and the like. Individuals surviving that kind of treatment could truly be proud of their superior health! Mary Gove Nichols, feminist and physician, was one of the very first women to lecture on medicine to whoever would come and listen. She advocated a healthy diet, the water cure, proper exercise, and rest; ideas that have well stood up the test of time.
The book is very well written; the illustrations are wonderful. It is a true treasure!! And, for a book from an academic publisher, remarkably affordable.

This book is that rarest of works--a wonderful read on an important, thought-provoking subject. As a biographer, Jean Silver-Isenstadt shows us how an individual life can reflect and reveal the ideas and ideals of a particular time and place, but she never reduces Mary Gove Nichols to a mere product of her era. Instead, the author deftly intertwines her subject's story with cogent and relvant insights into the history of health care and women's history, with the result that Mary Gove Nichols seems more--and not less--real.