Were Mary Gove Nichols's posthumous reputation to rest solely on her literary output, her claim to fame would be, at best, minimal. Admittedly, she wrote a large number of reviews, several novels and short stories, and many articles, but these have slight intrinsic literary merit. Only her vivid and sympathetic sketches of Edgar Allan Poe at Fordham Cottage in 1846, where he lived in desperate poverty while his wife, Virginia, lay dying, have earned Nichols notice in recent years--an appreciative nod, however curt, among the cognoscenti of Poe scholarship. Nichols's work, however, as a medical reformer who focused primarily on women's health issues and proposed radically new definitions of women's rights and roles is, of late, rescuing her from neglect and obscurity. In these areas Nichols's contributions as an essayist, editor, lecturer, and unlicensed physician were significant and, in several ways, pioneering. Nichols's lectures on marriage were radical, and...