# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Jacobi, Abraham

Edition of 1892.
​JACOBI, Abraham, physician, b. in Hartum, Westphalia, 6 May, 1830. He studied at the universities of Greifswald, Göttingen, and Bonn, and received the degree of M. D. at the last named in 1851. He became involved in the revolutionary movement in Germany, was held in detention at Berlin and Cologne in 1851, convicted of treason, and confined in the prisons of Minden and Bielefeld till the summer of 1853. After his discharge he went to England, and in the following autumn sailed for New York, where he settled as a practising physician. In 1861 he became professor of diseases of children in the New York medical college, held the same chair in the medical department of the University of the city of New York in 1867-'70, and in 1870 became clinical professor of the diseases of children in the College of physicians and surgeons. He has been president of the New York pathological and obstetrical societies, and twice of the Medical society of the county of New York, visiting physician to the German hospital since 1857, to Mount Sinai hospital since 1860, to the Hebrew orphan asylum and the infant hospital on Randall's island since 1868, and to Bellevue hospital since 1874. In 1882 he was president of the New York state medical society, and in 1885 became president of the New York academy of medicine. In 1868-'71 he was joint editor of the “American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children.” He is the author of “Contributions to Midwifery and Diseases of Women and Children” (New York, 1859), jointly with E. Noeggerath; “Dentition and its Derangements” (1862); “The Raising and Education of Abandoned Children in Europe” (1870); “Infant Diet” (1874); and of a “Treatise on Diphtheria” (1880). He contributed chapters on the care and nutrition of children, diphtheria, and dysentery to Gerhardt's “Handbuch der Kinderkrankheiten” (Tübingen, 1877), and on diphtheria, rachitis, and laryngitis to Pepper's “System of Practical Medicine” (Philadelphia), and has published lectures and reports on midwifery and female and infantile disease, and articles in medical journals. His “Sarcoma of the Kidney in the Fœtus and Infant” is printed in the “Transactions” of the International medical congress at Copenhagen. — His wife, Mary Putnam, physician, b. in London, England, 31 Aug., 1842, is a daughter of George P. Putnam. She studied in the Philadelphia woman's medical college, then in the New York college of pharmacy, of which she was the first woman graduate, and in 1868 went to Paris, and was the first woman admitted to the École de médecine, where she was graduated in 1871. She married in 1873 and has had three children. She was for twelve years dispensary physician in Mount Sinai hospital, became professor of materia medica in the Woman's medical college of the New York infirmary, and later a professor in the New York post-graduate medical school. In 1876 she was elected president of the Association for the advancement of the medical education of women. She is the author of “The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation,” an essay that won the Boylston prize at Harvard university in 1876; “The Value of Life” (New York, 1879); “Cold Pack and Anæmia” (1880); “Studies in Endometritis” in the “American Journal of Obstetrics” (1885); the articles on “Infantile Paralysis” and “Pseudo-Muscular Hypertrophy” in Pepper's “Archives of Medicine”; and “Hysteria, and other Essays” (1888).