Women in early modern Europe played important roles in the medical field through the production of domestic medicine and recipe books. However, women were often marginalized in this field and their healing methods were often considered unprofessional. Furthermore, historians of this period have often discounted their efforts and did not include domestic healthcare in the professional realm. An increased interest in this topic by scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, however, has led to a reevaluation of what constituted medical work in early modern Europe and generated a greater appreciation for women’s roles in healing and healthcare.[1] Historians of women in the medical sphere in early modern Europe commonly argue that women healers should be included when studying the medical field of this period. There is truth to this. However, women healers were so much more than just a part of this field, they were essential to it. Drawing largely on these arguments as well as early modern medical recipe books, I will argue that women healthcare practitioners and healers in early modern Europe were essential to the medical field because they made medicine and healing more accessible in the home, were approved and credible, contributed to women’s intellectual growth, and produced a sense of community.
Women were marginalized when it came to the medical sphere in early modern Europe because during this period, medicine was undergoing a process of professionalization, from which women were excluded. In her article, “Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe,” Sharon T. Strocchia addresses Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks’s book, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, which states that medicine, like other fields, was undergoing a process of professionalization from 1500 to 1800.[2] Strocchia notes that this professionalization emphasized “formal training, occupational titles and various licensing mechanisms,” opportunities from which women were excluded.[3] As a result, women were restricted from the public and professional life of medicine and were unable to move freely about professional jobs. Women were thus confined to domestic medicine, which included the production of recipe books. Their knowledge of medicine was persistently belittled and mocked by men from the sixteenth century on who had the opportunity to practice medicine professionally and sought to assert dominance and superiority.[4] Based on the fact that women healers’ medical knowledge was not based on academic knowledge, male medical professionals considered women healers to be “silly women,” “old wyves,” and “toothless, wrinkled chattery, superstitious taper-bearing old women.”[5] Because women were not gaining their medical knowledge through formal training or licensing, their health work was not only discredited, but these women were considered to be silly and witch-like. Thus, women healers were marginalized in the field of medicine and were blatantly ridiculed.
Until recently, historians of the early modern period have made the same mistake in discrediting women healers’ work; however, various studies have generated a greater appreciation for women healers. As Strocchia argues, “a narrow focus on official work identities has led us to both undercount and undervalue the healthcare services women provided to household and community.”[6] Contemporary historians of the early modern period have focused too narrowly on medical professionals and failed to include women healers in this category as well. Until recently, the domestic sphere had been left out of the medical sphere. However, in the past twenty years, scholars have created “new interpretive frameworks” to include women healers in the medical sphere and community.[7] One such framework is discussed in Mary E. Fissell’s article, “Introduction: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe.” Fissel argues that historians must abandon the previous boundaries that inherently excluded women from the medical field. One way that she addresses this is broadening the definition of healing within a larger category that Fissell and historian Kathy Brown have deemed “bodywork.”[8] With this framework, Fissell asks that historians “investigate the relationship between the work we consider medicine and the broader category of attending to the human body, and perhaps place medicine and its learned traditions within or next to the larger category of bodywork or body technologies.”[9] Fissell is essentially arguing that historians need to reexamine their definition of what exactly medical work is in order to focus on women’s roles in healthcare and healing in early modern Europe. There needed to be a redefinition of what constituted medical work in order to truly appreciate and understand women’s roles in medicine in early modern Europe.
While these scholars have examined women healers’ position in the medical sphere, I want to argue that they not only fit into this sphere but they were an essential component, one reason being that their recipes called for ingredients that were commonly available in many households in that period. Thus, medicine was made more accessible to many families in the domestic sphere through women in healthcare. Examples can be found in Elizabeth Strachey’s A book of receipts of all sorts. This recipe book was started in 1693 by Elizabeth Strachey and has magazine clippings up until October 1747, indicating that someone most likely took over for Strachey, perhaps her daughter. Many of the recipes and medical aids in this recipe book included ingredients that could be found in the kitchens during this period. For instance, a recipe for “A canker In the mowth” calls for “two peny worth of treacle” and “A Like quantaty of hony.”[10] Both treacle and honey were ingredients that were commonly used in kitchens for cooking in early modern Europe, and were thus accessible to most homes. The accessibility of these ingredients made these medical aids attainable for families and these recipes could be used in the home without having to see or pay a medical professional.
Another recipe book that contains examples of recipes with attainable ingredients is The English Medical Notebook, 17th Century from Wellcome Library in London. This medical notebook was started in 1650, and contains remedies for ailments including coughs, stomach aches, and fevers. It is unclear who wrote this particular recipe book; however, the name ‘Martha’ with an indecipherable last name is written twice on the second-to-last page, indicating that the author is probably a woman. The penmanship also remains relatively the same throughout the book, indicating that it was most likely written by the same person throughout. One recipe in this book for “M: Bakers Medicine for the Cough of the Lungs” calls for “three pints of runninge water,” “thyme” “figgs,” and “halfe a spoonefull of reisms.”[11] Each of these items were also common ingredients in homes, including fruits such as figs and “reisms” or raisins. Furthermore, women healers often included herbs such as thyme in their recipes, which could be grown in a home garden and thus even more available to households. Women healers created an accessible form of medicine for the domestic sphere with their remedies and recipes, and in her article, “Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household,” Elaine Leong states that “householders were not only quick to combine self-diagnosis and self-treatment with commercially available medical care but many also produced their own homemade medicines.”[12] Upon examining these recipe books, historians have been able to realize how essential the household was to medicine in early modern Europe as it provided diagnoses and treatment within the home rather than at hospitals or other medical sites. This accessibility can be lended in part to the specific ingredients used in these recipes that I have included. Women provided the community with recipes that used household items and ingredients, making medicine more accessible in the home, proving that women healers’ position in early modern medicine was essential to the community.
In addition to these ingredients being easily attainable, the recipe books were also credible, which was often indicated within the recipes. Recipes would often have “approved” written at the top of them. For instance, the “M: Bakers Medicine for the Cough of the Lungs” in The English Medical Notebook, 17th Century has “most Approved” written just below the title.[13] This indicated that these recipes were reliable and had been tested and approved by others besides the author of the recipe book. In some respects, the remedies developed by women were potentially more effective because they had been tested out and experimented with. The procedure of coming up with these remedies differs significantly with dogmatic medical teachings in books and training. These recipes were credible because they were not solely based on teachings but on actual experimentation and approval.
The creation and sharing of recipe books also contributed to women’s intellectual growth. By experimenting with different ingredients and recipes, women gained access to medical information that they had been excluded from during the period of professionalization. Katherine Allen addresses this idea in her article, “Hobby and Craft: Distilling Household Medicine in Eighteenth-Century England,” that was published in the interdisciplinary journal “Early Modern Women” in Fall 2016. She argues that when women engaged in experimentation and inquiry when creating these recipes, they grew morally as well as spiritually.[14] Allen explains that this was very important for women since they had been excluded from formal medical training and education.[15] She argues that recipe books “further testify to the existence of complex knowledge systems… and reflect an interest in, and deep engagement with, scientific thought and practice.[16] With recipe books, women were able to engage even deeper with these concepts by using thought and practice. Thus, the domestic sphere became a site of knowledge production and an unique area of study for medical knowledge.
The collaboration aspect of recipe books also built a sense of community among women, creating a social aspect. Recipe books were also passed down to later generations and between family members, and they became either authored by one woman or generations of women.[17] In the case of Elizabeth Strachey’s A book of receipts of all sorts, since the recipe book contains dates over the course of several years, it is probable that this book was continued by her daughter or a relative.[18] Furthermore, Fissel states that “recipes were gifts, not commerce” and were often shared not for reasons of commerce but as an act of neighborliness.[19] The exchange of recipe books was more about the social aspect and less about economic exchange. For instance, in Strachey’s recipe book, before one of the recipes it is stated that “the following receipt was sent for my own [ganes] in 1727 by Mrs. Fry, from one of her Phisitions.”[20] This comment not only implies that this recipe is credible, but also that Mrs. Fry had sent Strachey the recipe that she had received from her physician. It is an important example of the professional medical sphere being applied in the domestic sphere and emphasizes that these medical aids were not always something that was paid for in the domestic sphere. The sharing and passing down of these recipes created a sense of community between women.
However, there were instances in which recipes migrated from the domestic into the public sphere through print and publication. Women healers’ work was not always associated with commercialization; however, the aid that women provided with the use of these recipes often became public. One such example is bestselling Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent’s book A Choice Manual or Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery. This published recipe book was printed in London in 1655 and contains medical recipes ranging from “an Ach in the joynt” to “a sore Breast.”[21] This book serves as an important example of a recipe book that became published for the public. The foreword of the book addresses the “Courteous Reader” and states that if “the effect not answering thy curious expectation, upon a more ferious reflect, know, that nothing is absolutely perfect, and withal, that the richest and most foveraign Antidote may be often misapplied; wherefore the fault not being mine.”[22] When these books began to migrate to the public sphere, women had to ensure that their readers knew that the recipes would not always work in order to not receive backlash. Nonetheless, these books became popular in England in the 1650s and were an important example of women’s labor.[23] Thus, due to the accessibility and credibility of women’s recipe books, these recipes began to migrate from the domestic sphere to the public sphere.
Although women were excluded from the professional sphere of medicine in early modern Europe, they played a significant role in the medical field through their production of recipe books and their medical aid. They became collectors of knowledge, caregivers, and important members of the medical field, which can be observed through reading recipe books. Through the creation of medical recipe books, women made healthcare more accessible in the domestic sphere. They created a community and a site of knowledge production in the home, and contributed to women’s overall intellectual growth.
Allen, Katherine. “Hobby and Craft: Distilling Household Medicine in Eighteenth-Century England.” Early Modern Women 11, no. 1 (Fall 2016).
Fissel, Mary E. “Introduction: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 1 (Spring 2008).
Kent, Elizabeth Grey,Countess of, 1581-1651. London, printed by Gartrude Dawson. and are to be sold by William Shears, at the sign of the Bible in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1653. https://go.libproxy.wakehealth.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.go.libproxy.wakehealth.edu/books/choice-manuall-rare-select-secrets-physick/docview/2240917856/se-2?accountid=14868.
Leong, Elaine. “Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender, and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household.” Centaurus 55 (2013).
Strachey, Elizabeth. A book of receipts of all sorts. 1693. U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlmuid-101202660-bk#page/1/mode/1up.
Strocchia, Sharon T. “Introduction: Women and healthcare in early modern Europe.” Renaissance Studies 28, no. 4 (September 2014).
The English Medical Notebook, 17th Century, 1650. Shelfmark MS6812. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b18918463#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&z=-0.0556%2C-0.0441%2C1.1111%2C0.7628
Kent, Elizabeth Grey,Countess of, 1581-1651. London, printed by Gartrude Dawson. and are to be sold by William Shears, at the sign of the Bible in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1653. https://go.libproxy.wakehealth.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.go.libproxy.wakehealth.edu/books/choice-manuall-rare-select-secrets-physick/docview/2240917856/se-2?accountid=14868.
John Chantry, Object: Elizabeth Late Countess of Kent, 1656, engraving on paper, 112 x 56 mm., The British Museum, London. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_P-3-297