Women and Medicine

Women played substantial roles as healers in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, as well as experiencing ill health and serving as a focus of medical inquiry. The history of pre-modern women and medicine received its first modern treatment in a 1930s overview by a feminist physician, but the topic only began to receive sustained attention from the 1970s, when women’s history emerged as an academic discipline and the history of medicine became oriented to social history. Prior to this period, the history of medicine had emphasized the scientific developments that led to breakthroughs and the men who had made them and was often written by physicians. The ordinary everyday practice of medicine, let alone the kinds of domestic or marginal healing often performed by women, were simply not part of the agenda of the discipline. Feminist scholarship of the 1970s, combined with a new social history of medicine, broadened the remit of historians of medicine. Initially, historians offered stories of how male doctors elbowed female midwives out of the birthing room: a kind of feminist morality tale, a rejoinder to late 19th and early 20th century obstetricians’ portrayals of midwives as ignorant, superstitious, and dangerous. Such portrayals, of course, tell us more about the politics of obstetrics at the turn of the 20th century than they do about early modern midwives. Scholarship on women, health, and healing has expanded considerably since the 1970s, and such studies often complicate or nuance our more general understanding of early modern health and healing. First, scholarship on practitioners has broadened beyond midwives. While midwives were significant health-care providers (often the only medical occupation to be clearly designated in many historical records) we can now situate them in a much larger array of female healers. Healers ranged from the many women who prepared sophisticated medicines in their homes and treated family, friends, and neighbors, to the more specialized health-care workers such as searchers (who examined bodies to determine cause of death) and the variety of women who provided forms of nursing care in their own and others’ homes and in hospitals. Research into women and women’s experiences has also extended into other areas of medical history. Scholars have developed the history of the patient by examining the role of gender in shaping how women (and men) experienced illness and made meaning of their sufferings. Historians have also explored how ideas and practices about gender and body intersect with the history of medicine in multiple ways, from studies of popular ideas about reproduction to a new interpretation of the rise of anatomy that takes gender as a central category of analysis.

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