Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology.
[Health issues]. Gove, Mary S. Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology. With an appendix on water cure. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846.
12mo.; contemporary ownership signature; brown cloth decoratively stamped in blind and gilt; extremities lightly frayed.
Second edition, expanded with an appendix on water cure; the first edition came out in 1842. Rinderknecht and Bruntjen, A Checklist of American Imprints for 1846 46-5233. Not in DAB, which does cover this period of Gove’s career.
After the birth of her child in 1832, Mary Sargeant Neal Nichols Gove (1810-1884) began a study of books on health. When she and her husband moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1837, she put her knowledge to use by teaching anatomy and physiology to young women, and eventually by lecturing in surrounding towns. But Gove’s husband opposed her activities and beliefs, and, though it meant losing custody of their child, in 1840 she separated from him and briefly assumed the editorship of the Health Journal and Advocate of Physiological Reform, a periodical published in Worcester, Massachusetts, espousing vegetarianism.
Lectures to Women represents a culmination of this period of Gove’s life. By 1844 she had established herself in New York as a water cure physician, and four years later, by then divorced, she remarried. Her husband, Thomas Low Nichols, supported and shared her lifelong interest in reform, and together they founded and edited a monthly magazine, Nichols’ Journal, and wrote Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results (1854). They also lectured on the leading liberal causes of the day. Mrs. Gove’s other writings include Experience in Water-Cure (1949), Mary Lyndon; or Revelations of a Life (1855), and numerous contributions to the Herald of Health in London, where they settled during the Civil War and remained until their deaths. “She died in London in her seventy-fourth year, a dauntless crusader for many unpopular causes” (DAB, p. 496).
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