Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe
Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe
Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe
Mary E. Fissell
Almost everyone in early modern Europe was brought into the world by
women and ushered out of it by women. Women’s hands birthed babies,
cut umbilical cords, and swaddled newborns. Women’s hands treated the
sick, comforted the dying, and laid out bodies, readying them for burial.
Women, in other words, were central to health and healing before 1800.
This special issue includes a variety of articles, most of which were first
presented at a conference in April 2006, that bring fresh perspectives to
the histories of women as healers and women as patients in early modern
Europe.1 By putting women in the center, and by starting our inquiry with
healing, at the bedside of the sick, we can rethink some of the categories
of analysis we have been using for the past few decades of the social history
of medicine. Further, when we re-embed healing within more general care
of the body, we abolish hierarchies of value created by learned physicians
and reproduced by later generations seeking to create or endorse tradi-
tions within medicine—seeking professional ancestors as object lessons.
It is a great pleasure to thank Sandra Cavallo, Amy Froide, and Katharine Park for their
helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay, and to thank Olivia Weisser for timely
and skilled research assistance.
1. For details, see www.hopkinsmedicine.org/histmed.
Interest in the history of women healers goes back to at least the early
modern period. In their introductions, seventeenth-century writers of
midwifery books liked to nod to the biblical mentions of midwifery in
order to justify their writing on the topic, or sometimes to underline the
worth of midwives. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian medical
historians created traditions about medieval female physicians of Salerno.2
Midwives, of course, featured as the bad girls in late nineteenth-century
narratives about the rise of obstetrics.3 In the twentieth century, a few
pioneer women physicians explored what we might consider their own
prehistory—that is, the longue durée of female healers.4 In North America,
the women’s movement of the 1970s prompted questions about women’s
participation in (or exclusion from) medicine and its historical roots,
notably in Mary Roth Walsh’s pioneering “No Women Need Apply,” which
spawned a rich scholarship on women physicians, followed about a decade
later by significant attention to the history of nursing.5
Feminists asked about women patients as well as women doctors. Schol-
ars such as Ann Douglas Wood, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Charles
Rosenberg put Victorian women patients at the center of the story—and
it is not a happy tale. In less-skilled hands than these, such narratives
reduced female patients to victims of patriarchal male physicians.6 Early
2. Monica H. Green, “In Search of an ‘Authentic’ Women’s Medicine: The Strange Fates
of Trota of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen,” Dynamis, 1999, 19 : 25–54.
3. E.g., J. H. Aveling, The Chamberlens and the Midwifery Forceps: Memorials of the Family and
an Essay on the Invention of the Instrument (London: Churchill, 1882).
4. Kate Hurd-Mead, A History of Women in Medicine (Haddam, Conn.: Haddam Press,
1938).
5. Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical
Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). On women doctors see,
e.g., Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Virginia Drachman, Hospital with a Heart: Women
Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862–1969 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984). On nursing, see Susan M. Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of
American Nursing, 1850–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Darlene Clark
Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Judith Leavitt’s collection of articles was
very influential in making women and medicine a successful topic for undergraduate teach-
ing: Judith Walzer Leavitt, ed., Women and Health in America: Historical Readings (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
6. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in
Nineteenth-Century America,” Soc. Res., 1972, 39 : 652–72; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and
Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her
Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” J. Amer. Hist., 1973, 60 : 332–56; Ann Douglas Wood,
“‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-
Century America,” J. Interdiscip. Hist., 1973, 4 : 25–52; or, at a more popular level, Barbara
Introduction
modern patients did not get their due until Roy Porter almost single-hand-
edly put patients onto the agenda of the history of medicine—and then
the focus was squarely on early modern men.7 It is only very recently that
scholars have begun to think about the early modern patient in gender
terms, some while after that same lens was turned upon practitioners.8
For the early modern period, the impetus to look at women and healing
has been a little different from that of Walsh or Wood. The scholarship on
the nineteenth century discussed above often had specific political goals:
the indictment of sexism embedded in medical ideas and practices, and
the expanded inclusion of women in the medical profession. No such
straightforward lessons for today structure scholarship on medieval and
early modern women and healing. Instead, women’s and then gender
history came to explore early modern female healers by three related
pathways: the recuperation of midwives, the history of women’s work,
and the recovery and analysis of medical texts related to women. The first
accomplished almost a complete reversal of accepted wisdom: from super-
stitious, ignorant, and dangerous women, midwives have been recuper-
ated as competent practitioners with their own unwritten knowledge and
practices transmitted orally from teacher to student. For a brief moment,
the hero/villain roles were reversed: the ignorant midwife swapped places
with an inexperienced, instrument-wielding man-midwife, cast as a villain.9
Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (Old
Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973).
7. Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
8. Barbara Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1991); Lauren Kassell, “How to Read Simon Forman’s Case Books: Medicine, Astrology,
and Gender in Seventeenth-Century London,” Soc. Hist. Med., 1999, 12 : 3–18. I draw a
distinction here between those few studies that explore how gender shapes or constructs
the experiences of being sick or being a patient, and the much larger and richer literature
on gender and the body, such as Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in
Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); or Gianna Pomata,
“Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine,”
in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity
through Early Modern Europe, ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2001), pp. 109–52.
9. Crucial to the recuperation was Hilary Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery (London:
Routledge, 1993). Subsequent examples include Doreen Evenden, The Midwives of Seven-
teenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Nina Gelbart, The
King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998). There has also been a range of cultural studies of childbirth and midwifery,
such as Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2005); Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003).
mary e. fissell
10. Monica H. Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval
Women’s Medicine,” Stud. Mediev. & Renaiss. Hist., 3rd ser, 2005, 2 : 1–46, esp. p. 15; Green,
Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
11. Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,”
Signs, 1989, 14 : 434 –73.
12. Merry Wiesner, “Early Modern Midwifery: A Case Study,” in Women and Work in Pre-
Industrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986),
pp. 94 –113.
13. For a sample of such work, see Monica H. Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium
of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); “The Possibilities
of Literacy and the Limits of Reading: Women and the Gendering of Medical Literacy,” in
Monica Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate,
Introduction
group of scholars has begun to tackle one of the forms of writing often
(but not exclusively) associated with women: the recipe book. These texts,
which exist in relatively large numbers for the early modern period, do not
lend themselves to easy analysis—they are often just series of recipes, with-
out much (or sometimes any) paratextual apparatus that would provide
insights into composition and use. Nevertheless, scholars such as Elaine
Leong and Alisha Rankin (both included in this issue), Jennifer Stine,
and Catherine Field have begun sophisticated analyses of these texts by
attending to the contexts of both composition and use.14
Two interconnected problems continue to shape our attempts to write
histories of women and healing before 1800. First, for structural reasons,
women’s health-care work is underdocumented compared to that of many
men. Second, we are working in a scholarship that continues to value, and
perhaps even reify, boundaries between types of healers, between men’s
work and women’s work, and between healing and caregiving. At the risk
of throwing out several babies with the bathwater, I am going to suggest
that we loosen the grip that these boundaries have upon our historical
imaginations.
In medieval and early modern sources, men are identified by occu-
pational labels much more frequently than are women. Quite simply,
there were legal and administrative reasons for recording men’s work-
titles—but also, the structures of men’s work often differed from those of
women. Women, for example, rarely enjoyed the semimonopolistic kinds
of employment protection and relative career stability provided by guilds
or city companies. An older literature put women healers at the margins:
2000), pp. 1–76; Green, “From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transfor-
mation of Gynecological Literature,” J. Mediev. & Early Mod. Stud., 2000, 30 : 5–39; Mont-
serrat Cabré, “From a Master to a Laywoman: A Feminine Manual of Self-Help,” Dynamis,
2000, 20 : 371–93; Helen King, Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a
Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); King, The Disease of Virgins: Green
Sickness, Chlorosis, and the Problems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2004); Joan Cadden, The
Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993).
14. Jennifer K. Stine, “Opening Closets: The Discovery of Household Medicine in Early
Modern England” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1996); Elaine Leong, “Medical Recipe
Collections in Seventeenth-Century England: Knowledge, Gender, and Text” (D.Phil. diss.,
Oxford University, 2005); Alisha Rankin, “Medicine for the Uncommon Woman: Experience,
Experiment, and Exchange in Early Modern Germany” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University,
2005); Catherine Field, “‘Many Hands Hands’: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s
Recipe Books,” in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Michelle Dowd
and Julie Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 49–63. On printed recipe collections, see
Lisa K. Meloncon, “Rhetoric, Remedies, Regimens: Popular Science in Early Modern Eng-
land” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2005); and see n. 24 below.
mary e. fissell
15. Maryanne Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 168.
16. Olwen Hufton, “Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France
in the Eighteenth Century,” J. Fam. Hist., 1984, 9 : 355–76, on p. 363.
17. Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–
1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 1.
18. For examples of women’s participation in early modern economies, see Amy M.
Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), pp. 117–53; Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Marjorie Keniston Mcintosh, Working Women
in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sheilagh
Introduction
Ogivie, “How Does Social Capital Affect Women? Guilds and Communities in Early Modern
Germany,” Amer. Hist. Rev., 2004, 109 : 324 –59. On the specific issue of occupational titles
see, e.g., Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, “Work and Identity in Early Modern Portugal: What Did
Gender Have to Do with It?” J. Soc. Hist., 2002, 35 : 859–87; Cordelia Beattie, “The Prob-
lems of Women’s Work Identities in Post Black Death England,” in The Problem of Labour in
Fourteenth Century England, ed. James Bothwell (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 1–19;
Gayle K. Brunelle, “Policing the Monopolizing Women of Early Modern Nantes,” J. Women’s
Hist., 2007, 19 : 10–35.
19. Eileen Power, “Some Women Practitioners of Medicine in the Middle Ages,” Proc. Roy.
Soc. Med., 1922, 15 : 20–23; Pearl Kibre, “The Faculty of Medicine at Paris, Charlatanism and
Unlicensed Medical Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” Bull. Hist. Med., 1953, 27 : 1–20.
20. Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1989), p. 2.
21. Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and
Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003).
mary e. fissell
22. Jean E. Ward and Joan Yell, eds., The Medical Casebook of William Brownrigg, M.D., F.R.S.
(1712–1800) of the Town of Whitehaven in Cumberland, Supplement no. 13 to Medical History
(London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1993), pp. 128–36.
23. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake
and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: Published for Omohundro Institute of Early American History
and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 625.
24. Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick
and Chyrurgery; collected, and practised by the Right Honorable, the Countesse of Kent, late deceased
(London, 1653), Wing K310B. On this text, see Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Opening the
Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery,” Renaiss.
Quart., 2007, 60 : 464 –99, for fascinating insights into this issue. See also Jayne Archer, “The
Queen’s Arcanum: Authority and Authorship in The Queen’s Closet Opened (1655),” Renaiss.
J., 2002, 1 : 14 –26.
10 mary e. fissell
25. And patronage relations structured interactions between poor patients and their
healers also. Gianna Pomata recounts the story of Angelo Ratti, a seventeenth-century
carpenter who sought advice from the noted physician and surgeon Antonio Valsalva and
from the dean of the college of medicine, when he thought he had been cheated by an
unlicensed healer: Gianna Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early
Modern Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 125–27.
26. Yaarah Bar-On, “Neighbours and Gossip in Early Modern Gynaecology,” in Cultural
Approaches to the History of Medicine, ed. Willem de Blécourt and Cornelie Usborne (London:
Palgrave, 2004), pp. 36–55.
27. See Cabré, “From a Master to a Laywoman” (n. 13) and Green, “Bodies, Gender,
Health, Disease” (n. 10); Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities,
Families and Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Introduction 11
28. Rachelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Inter-
pretation of Plague in England, 1574 –1665,” Gender & Hist., 1999, 11 : 1–29.
12 mary e. fissell
Nancy Siraisi and Margaret Pelling have reminded us, attention to the
appearance of the body was long considered to be a part of medicine, or
at least a legitimate concern for a physician.29 Indeed, one of the Trotula
texts and a section of the first English book on midwifery are devoted to
cosmetics. The close and overlapping relationships among moral worth,
physical attractiveness, and health meant that attending to the body’s sur-
face had implications beyond what we think of as “health.” For example,
helping children to grow up “straight”—that is, not crippled, rickety, or
deformed—clearly had moral as well as aesthetic meaning. In German-
speaking cities, the institution of the bathhouse provided a venue for a
range of practitioners who let blood, cupped, gave massages, and offered
various other procedures, both therapeutic and health-enhancing. I think
that if we want to attend to how individuals made choices among a range
of practitioners, we cannot exclude, say, a bloodletting wigmaker on the
basis of his guild affiliation or supposed lack of training; instead, we need
categories broad enough to include him and his services. And, lest we
get sniffy about whom we wish to investigate under the rubric of “history
of medicine,” let us remember that we live in a moment when cosmetic
plastic surgery is televised as entertainment.
Third, how do we consider wet nurses in relation to medicine? Cer-
tainly, the choice of a correct wet nurse was a topic addressed by many a
physician. But wet nurses also provided health care to their charges, and
sometime to others.30 In the essay by Harkness in this issue, she recounts
the story of Sir Hugh Plat’s wet nurse offering him a recipe for gout, an
ailment not usually associated with babies! Perhaps her identity as a wet
nurse was irrelevant in this context—perhaps she was just an older woman,
29. Nancy Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 281, 283; Margaret Pelling, “Appearance
and Reality: Barber-Surgeons, the Body, and Disease,” in London 1500–1700: The Making of
the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (London: Longmans, 1985), pp. 82–112.
30. See Dorothy McLaren, “Nature’s Contraceptive: Wet-Nursing and Prolonged Lacta-
tion, the Case of Chesham, Buckinghamshire, 1578–1601,” Med. Hist., 1979, 23 : 426–41;
McLaren, “Fertility, Infant Mortality, and Breast Feeding in the Seventeenth Century,” ibid.,
1978, 22 : 378–96; Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988); Fildes, “The English Wet-Nurse and Her Role in Infant Care 1538–1800,”
Med. Hist., 1988, 32 : 142–73; Linda Campbell, “Wet-Nurses in Early Modern England: Some
Evidence from the Townshend Archive,” ibid., 1989, 33 : 360–70; Mary Lindemann, “Love
for Hire: The Regulation of the Wet-Nursing Business in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg,”
J. Fam. Hist., 1981, 6 : 379–95; Leah L. Otis, “Municipal Wet Nurses in Fifteenth-Century
Montpellier,” in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1986), pp. 83–93; Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and
Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance
Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 132–64.
Introduction 13
31. Samantha Williams, “Caring for the Sick Poor: Poor Law Nurses in Bedfordshire
c. 1770–1834,” in Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850, ed. Penelope Lane, Neil
Raven, and K. D. M. Snell (Rochester: Boydell, 2004), pp. 141–69, on p. 151.
14 mary e. fissell
32. Peter Earle, “The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and
Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Econ. Hist. Rev., 1989, 42 : 328–53. On the category “nurse-
keeper,” see the germinal essay by Margaret Pelling, “Nurses and Nursekeepers: Problems
of Identification in the Early Modern Period,” in The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupa-
tions and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England, ed. Pelling (London: Longmans, 1998),
pp. 179–202.
33. Today, many states do not certify home health aides as health workers—yet they are,
of course, hired to provide health care!
34. See Felicity Riddy, “Looking Closely: Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban
Home,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C.
Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 212–28, for a
fascinating exploration of the gendering of care in relation to patriarchy. Patriarchy, Riddy
claims, stops at the chamber door, because of the gendered nature of bodily care.
35. Margaret Pelling, “Compromised by Gender: The Role of the Male Medical Prac-
titioner in Early Modern England,” in The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in
England and the Netherlands 1450–1800, ed. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (Rotterdam:
Erasmus, 1996), pp. 101–33.
Introduction 15
will only one gender do, and why? Then we can ask about those areas
of healing that are more commonly (but not exclusively) performed by
one sex or the other, and explore how and why these seeming patterns of
inclusion and exclusion worked in practice. Part of the answer we already
know: women were not allowed to study medicine at universities, and
urban apprenticeships to surgeons and apothecaries were largely limited
to boys, although in various circumstances women performed much the
same work. There, the civic function of apprenticeship and its customary
outcome—assuming a civic role as a male head of household—explains
much of the gender imbalance. At the risk of generalizing too soon, it
seems to me that there were actually only a few instances in early modern
Europe when categorically one sex was almost always required: in normal
childbirth, and for what I might call brute-force operative surgery—that
is, amputations, cutting for the stone, and, as the document published
by Katharine Park in this issue illustrates, Caesarean section. Many other
examples—medicine on shipboard, the healing roles of executioners,
sacerdotal healing that was primarily spiritual (including exorcisms)—are
second-order effects of gender roles: it is not the healing as such that is
gendered, but the social roles through which that healing is accomplished.
Thus, since women almost never worked aboard ships in this period, it is
not surprising that women were not ship’s surgeons (who, of course, also
had to perfom brute-force surgery). As in the example above, appren-
ticeships were both training and an entrée to participation in male civic
life, so only widows (who functioned in their husbands’ stead) worked as
apothecaries or physicians or surgeons per se (and even here, it is difficult
to know what they actually did).
In our world, replete with dual-career couples, it can be easy to forget
that the household, rather than the individual, was often the productive
unit in medieval and early modern Europe. The family business, be that
bleeding and cupping, making medicines, cutting hair, or even writing
and practicing scholarly humanist medicine, was structured in such a way
that we often cannot know which person was doing exactly what work.
Apprentices and domestic servants, who might function as de facto off-
spring for the better part of a decade, were integral to household pro-
duction, but so too were wives and daughters. It is only through histori-
cal happenstance, such as the death of the head of household and his
replacement by his widow, that we can glimpse the complexity of labor
relations within the household.
The essays in this volume, taken together, suggest that we might situate
women’s healing (and women as patients) in two interconnecting frames:
work, and household/family (perhaps better theorized as “domestic”?).
16 mary e. fissell
36. See, e.g., Judith M. Bennett, “Confronting Continuity,” J. Women’s Hist., 1997, 9 :
73–94; Bennett, “Women’s History: A Study in Continuity and Change,” Women’s Hist. Rev.,
1993, 2 : 173–84.
Introduction 17
37. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection
(New York: Zone Books, 2006).
38. Here I follow Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the
Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).