Rather than “abortionist,” the women I have been studying, all of whom operated in antebellum New York City, called themselves female physicians. Madame Restell (aka Ann Lohman) is the most well-remembered among them today, but there were many others. Longworth’s city directories of the late 1830s list an Elizabeth Mott, female physician, residing at 119 Spring Street. Others in the trade, including Mrs. Bird, Madame Costello, and Mrs. Sarah Anne Welch, one-time competitors of Restell, used the same language, both in city directories and in their advertisements. Madame Costello (aka Catharine Maxwell) published a book on the subject in 1860: A Female Physician to the Ladies of the United States: Being a Familiar and Practical Treatise on Matters of Utmost Importance Peculiar to Women.[2]
None of these women had MDs. The first woman in the United States to receive formal medical training, Elizabeth Blackwell, did not earn her degree until 1849. In using the term, however, Restell and others of her ilk were not actually attempting to deceive. She and other New Yorkers would have understood a physician as a practitioner of medicine, as distinct from a surgeon, who was capable of operating on people, was likely to be formally trained, and was without question male. It is also the case that no medical doctor was licensed at the time; with a handful of short-lived exceptions, states simply did not issue medical licenses until later in the nineteenth century. It is highly unlikely that any unsuspecting patient would have believed that a female physician was formally trained. For Restell, and others, the phrase meant that she was a woman who provided medical services to other women, medical services that were almost exclusively related to that which made women distinct from men: their capacity for pregnancy. There is no question that “female physician” eventually became synonymous with “abortion” in the minds of many, but that should not detract from what those who used the phrase might have meant by it. In employing this language Restell and others like her were not simply describing their trade; implicitly they were also asserting their claim upon this term at a moment when medicine was changing, women losing ground in a domain that had largely been theirs for centuries, if not millennia.[3]