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Josephine McCarty, née Fagan, aka Mrs. Virginia S. Seymour, dba Emma Burleigh. M.D., was many things: mother, teacher, saleswoman, spy, lobbyist, and abortionist. And in 1872 she was also an accused murderer, after eyewitnesses saw her fire a pistol on a public streetcar in Utica, New York, killing one man and wounding another. Historian R.E. Fulton, author of The Abortionist of Howard Street: Medicine and Crime in Nineteenth-Century New York, joins the podcast this week to discuss how Josephine was both extraordinary and completely ordinary and what her life can tell us about the changing arena of medicine and law and the role of women in both in the late 19th Century United States.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Sad Violin,” by Oleggio Kyrylkoww from Pixabay and is available for use under the Pixabay Content License. The episode image is "Women indoors, France, 1870s" in the public domain and available via the New York Public Library Digital Collections.
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I study women, murder, and medicine. Not necessarily all at once, or in that order.
My training, from Clarkson University in upstate New York and the University of Rochester in western New York, is in the history of science and culture in the United States. In 2015, I received a Master’s degree in American History, and began seeking ways to tell the stories of women in history outside of the academy. Most recently, I’ve worked as an interpretive educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and an editor at a feminist medical history blog called Nursing Clio.
I believe that women’s history matters, and it matters because it is connected to our present in ugly and uncomfortable ways. Medicine has always been a force of both oppression and protection for women. Murder has become a site of research for me because murder, unfortunately, has often been the moment that highlights the lives of women more often invisible in the historical record: abuse victims, criminals, gender transgressors, and the many women, including Josephine McCarty, who were a little of everything.
