Money, Marriage, and Madness: The Life of Anna Ott By Kim E. Nielsen

Abstract

Kim Nielsen’s Money, Marriage, and Madness: The Life of Anna Ott is a brief, beautifully written, and wholly original biography.  Dr. Anna Barbara Blaser Miesse Ott was not a particularly significant physician, suffrage activist, or insanity advocate. Nevertheless, Nielsen argues, Ott’s “unremarkedness   and   unremark-ableness” (p. 11) make her a worthy historical subject who reveals much about marriage and divorce, domestic violence, medicine and disability, and institutional incarceration in the nineteenth-century United States.