Women in healing spaces

Abstract

Women wrote about health, healing and the body in a variety of spaces in early modern England. When we look from the top down, that is from the perspective of a physician, we see few women healers, and even fewer women writers. However, if we start at the bedside, we see women involved in a wide range of healing activities, many of which they preserved in one form of writing or another. In order to understand the kinds of women's writings that have survived, we need to frame those texts in two larger contexts, that of medical work, and that of women's speech. Historians used to think that medical work in early modern England was organized the way that physicians imagined that it should be: with themselves at the top, overseeing their inferiors. We now recognize that vision for the fantasy that it was. There were many kinds of health care providers in early modern England. The basic four clearly identified occupational groups were midwives, apothecaries, surgeons and physicians. Of these, women were eligible for entry only into the ranks of midwives. They were barred from universities and thus from becoming physicians, and they were not apprenticed to surgeons or apothecaries. However, these groups represented only a portion of England's female healers. Many, many others practised in part-time or occasional fashion. Equally if not more important, many women were responsible for the health of their household, diagnosing, prescribing and preparing medicines at home. We will never know the full extent of women's health care practice, but women were a substantial portion of practitioners.

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