The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion, Embracing the Treatment of Menstruation, or Monthly Turns, During their Stoppage, Irregularity, or Entire Suppression. Pregnancy, and How it May be Determined . . . By Dr. A. M. Mauriceau, Professor of Diseases of Women. Office, 129 Liberty street.
New York: [n. p., but presumably Charles Lohman], 1847. First edition. 12mo (6.38 x 4.25 inches), original discreet blind-stamped unlettered green cloth, xiii, [1], 238 pages. Cloth somewhat spotted and soiled, corners bumped and rubbed; some foxing throughout; a good to very good copy. Item #22447
“In France, and on the Continent of Europe generally, a covering (used by the male), called a baudruche (known as the French Secret), is used with success, with the view of preventing pregnancy. . . . Address Dr. A. M. Mauriceau, Box ‘1224,’ N. Y. City, who will send them by mail to any part of the United States. Price $5 a dozen.” Published pseudonymously by the Russian-American radical printer Charles Lohman (though with the copyright given to his brother-in-law, Joseph Trow); Lowman was also husband to and business partner of Madame Restell (the professional name of Ann Trow Lohman), New York City’s foremost abortion provider, this title an important popular early American book on contraception and abortion that went through numerous printings up through the 1860s. The earliest example of this work, published contemporaneously to Ann Lohman’s trial and jailing in 1847; abortion had been outlawed in New York the previous year, and she was convicted of manslaughter in the next and was imprisoned through 1849. Restell had been providing her services from about 1837 at an address on Greenwich Street (just around the corner from 129 Liberty Street), and, as noted in Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca 1994), historian Janet Brodie suggests the connection between Restell’s conviction and the expansion of the local operation into the contraceptive mail-order business—explaining “in 1847, while Restell was in prison, [they] went into the reproductive control business using the alias ‘Dr. A. M. Mariceau.’ . . . Primarily an inducement to readers to send money for secret remedies and to come to the Liberty Street address for abortions, it offered remedies through the mail or in person.” Charles Lohman continued in business at the Liberty Street address as A. M. Mauriceau until his death in 1877, when Ann Lohman’s brother Joseph Trow took on the business over her objections; ads in the columns of the New York Herald on December 23, 1879 tout Mauriceau as at that location for “over 30 years.” Atwater 2398. This title eventually settled into a fairly standardized identity package of unlettered blind-stamped brown cloth, and is uncommonly met with in green cloth, as here.
Price: $650.00