Money, Marriage, and Madness is a story of the medical profession, a woman’s wealth and the gendered property laws in which she operated, marital violence, marriage and divorce, institutional incarceration, and an alleged bank robbery. Dr. Anna B. Miesse Ott lived in a legal context governing money, marriage, and madness that nearly all nineteenth-century women shared. She benefited from wealth, professional status as a physician, and whiteness, but they did not protect her from the vulnerabilities generated by sexism and ableism. After an 1856 marriage and divorce, Ott served for nearly twenty years as a physician in Madison, Wisconsin and garnered additional wealth. In 1873, her husband and local physicians testified to her insanity, as well as her legal incompetency, and Ott entered the gates of the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane where she remained until her 1893 death. Her decades of institutionalization reveal daily life in a late nineteenth-century asylum and the permeability of its walls. Tracing the stories told of her after her death enables analyses of the impact of the diagnosis of mania and institutionalization on our memory of her. In addition, this book explores historical methods, ethics, and dilemmas confronted when historical sources are limited and come not from the subject but from those with greater power.
Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America
