Nicholas L. Syrett’s new biography, The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (The New Press, 2023), tells the story of one of the most important female doctors of the nineteenth century, a tale with unmistakable parallels today.
“Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control, delivered children, and performed abortions for decades in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. “Restellism” becoming a term detractors used to indict her. [Read more…] about The Trials of Madame Restell: A Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime