Healers, innovators, entrepreneurs: women in early modern healthcare

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Notes

1 Important works that shifted our focus from physicians to a broader range of medical practitioners and the consumers of their services are Katharine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Matthew Ramsey, Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Michael McVaugh, ‘Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71:2 (1997), 201–23; Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Gianna Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Margaret Pelling, ‘Trade or Profession? Medical Practice in Early Modern England’, in The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations, and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 230–58; Heikki Mikkeli, Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science, 1999); Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

2 A good place to start for studying women in medieval and early modern medicine is the Bulletin of the History of Medicine’s 2008 special issue on ‘Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe.’ In this volume see, Mary Fissell, ‘Introduction: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe’, 1–17; Montserrat Cabré, ‘Women or Healers? Household Practices and the Categories of Health Care in Late Medieval Iberia’, 18–51; Deborah E. Harkness, ‘A View from the Streets: Women and Medical Work in Elizabethan London,’ 52–85; Cathy McClive, ‘Blood and Expertise: The Trials of the Female Medical Expert in the Ancien Régime Courtroom’, 86–108; Alisha Rankin, ‘Duchess, Heal Thyself: Elisabeth of Rochlitz and the Patient’s Perspective in Early Modern Germany’, 109–44; Elaine Leong, ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, 145–68; and Katharine Park, ‘The Death of Isabella Volpe: Four Eyewitness Accounts of a Postmortem Cesarean Section in 1545’, 169–87. See also, Monica Green, ‘Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe’, Signs 14 (1989), 434–73, item, ‘Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (2005), 1–46; Susan Broomhall, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004); Annemarie Kinzelbach, ‘Women and Healthcare in Early Modern German Towns’, Renaissance Studies 28 (2014), 619–38.

3 See, Margaret Pelling, ‘Thoroughly Resented? Older Women and the Medical Role in Early Modern London’, in Women, Science, and Medicine 1500-1700, eds. Lynetter Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton, England, 1997), pp. 63–88; Sara Pennell, ‘Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes, and Knowledge in Early Modern England’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, eds. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237–58; Seth Stein LeJacq, ‘The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling, and Surgery in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine 26 (2013), 451–68; Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘The Nun Apothecaries of Renaissance Florence: Marketing Medicines in the Convent’, Renaissance Studies 25:5 (2011), 627–47.

4 For the most recent work on this historiographical reorientation, see Sara Ritchey, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021) and the volume Ritchey co-edited with Strocchia, Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

5 On this point, Strocchia builds on Katharine Park’s Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2006), which argues that dissection, a practice scholars have tended to study in a professional or academic context, developed out of a set of cultural practices linked to women in convents and households that had nothing to do with medical instruction.

6 On the contact zone, see Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991), 33–40; Item, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2007).

7 For work on the importance of preventive or prophylactic health strategies in early modern Europe see, Sandra Cavallo, ‘Secrets to Healthy Living: The Revival of the Preventive Paradigm in Late Renaissance Italy’, in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500-1800, eds. Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 191–212; Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Elizabeth W. Mellyn, ‘Passing on Secrets: Interactions between Latin and Vernacular Medicine in Medieval Europe’, I Tatti Sutides in the Italian Renaissance 16:1 (2013), 289–309.

8 Strocchia, Forgotten Healers, 131. For historiographical shift from book learning to artisanal practice and craft culture in early modern science, see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800, eds. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, eds. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Edita, 2007); Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioner and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011); Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, eds. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).

9 See, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, ‘Teaching Literature and Medicine: A Retrospective and a Rationale’, in Teaching Literature and Medicine, eds. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre (New York: Modern Language Association, 2000), pp. 1–25 and Thomas R. Cole, Nathan S. Carlin, Ronald A. Carson, eds., Medical Humanities: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

10 For the significant increase in medical humanities programmes outside of medical schools see, Erin Lamb, Sarah L. Berry and Therese Jones, Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the United States (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, March 2020).

11 For disciplinary and semantic reassessments see, Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman, eds., Health Humanities Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Paul Crawford, ed., Health Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Alan Bleakley, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Medical Humanities (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).