By Nana Ogburn

Early modern women became associated with healthcare due to their association with the domestic sphere. Since women were responsible for taking care of the members of the household, medicine was no exception.[4] Women were then expected to develop “necessary” knowledge in order to “manage illness and administer remedies within a domestic setting”.[5] This meant that wives, mothers, daughters, domestic servants, and enslaved people had a mastery of medical knowledge.[6] During a time as medically tumultuous as the Black Death, women were expected to fulfill their naturally nurturing roles; preparing food and providing care for the body were essentially a “female task”.[7] Gender expectations became woven into medical care for several reasons. Women were responsible for preparing meals, prepared medicines, and did laundry for the ill. As a result, men were strongly disassociated with the medical field because they simply did not partake in these domestic duties. In fact, medical care was strongly associated with women to extent that male physicians relied on philosophical justifications of their practice in order to “avoid appearing feminine.”[8] Women were thus essential to healthcare in the early modern period due to close associations with the domestic sphere.[9]

The domestic sphere gave women a physical space that allowed them to generate a new information network that comprised of medical skills and study methods. This network centralized medicinal recipes: they were the “most widespread form of medical writing in early modern Europe and the only textual genre in which women can be found readily as medical authors and authorities.”[10] Women could borrow recipes from acquaintances, family, and even from published works. At home in the kitchen, women could then recreate or experiment with these recipes and depending on the results, would document her own experience. Recreating recipes is synonymous with knowledge creation because recipes were impossible to reproduce identically. Women could then engage in this network of medical knowledge through different methods: creating new knowledge through experiments, consulting healthcare manuals, and using personal study techniques.[11] To illustrate these different approaches, I have selected three different recipe books from 1625, 1639, and 1660 that feature a recipe for wound care.

The 1625 and 1660 recipes on wound care illustrate how women experimented with medical knowledge based on the language present in the recipes. The deliberate word choice in some recipes reflect not only the compiler’s approval for its efficacy, but also serves as a kind of testimony that the compiler most likely experimented in order to reach that conclusion.[12] There are several “types” of language that appears in recipe books that signal experience. Other notes in the margin that explain changes made to the recipe, commentary on how to find the best ingredients for the recipe, or language that reflects personal evaluation.[13] Some recipes simply use the word “approved”.[14] Both the 1625 and 1660 recipes incorporate language that match the personal evaluation category by including quantified directions like the number of days or the number of times within a specific range. Documenting a range and using the word “or” or “within” reflects the medicinal recipe compiler’s conclusions after conducting different experiments; they have worked with the recipe enough to decide that the recipe will still succeed within a specific range.

Each woman had her own approach to medicine, whether if it was through experimentation, consulting manuals, or a combination of both. Medicinal recipe books demonstrate how women had full control over their healthcare study methods. They deemed what recipes were useful to specific health issues, no two treatments were identical. The three different wound care recipes have significantly different approaches to healing wounds. The 1625 recipe requires an herb-laiden “drink” that requires the patient to consume and “anoynte” on the wound.[25] The 1639 recipe is perhaps the most simple, only requiring egg shells and a columbine plant to be placed directly on the wound. The 1660 recipe features a homemade spread that is supposed to go on a soaked “plaister” before placing it on the wound.[26] The recipe even calls for dressing the wound[27], a step neither the 1625 nor 1639 recipes include. Thus, these recipes illustrate how women understood a universal practice such as wound care in contrasting manners. Each compiler documented recipes that they respectively deemed as effective healthcare, contributing to the growth of early modern British healthcare as one of diverse approaches.

Though women were not given proper and official recognition for the many different medical roles women fulfilled, medicinal recipe books serve as physical reminders for the intellectual contributions that were necessary in developing healthcare for the community. In the household, women could experiment with different medicinal recipes and then document their successes by stating that the recipe bas been “proved” (seen in the 1625 recipe), adding notes of caution (seen in the 1639 recipe), or putting their name for approval (seen in the 1660 recipe). If women were not creating original medical knowledge, then they consulted other medical manuals and extensively taking notes in order to incorporate the new information into their own practice. The extensive knowledge women possessed regarding care, healing, and health promotion allowed women to dominate healthcare and work in public spaces such as hospitals, parishes, and the homes of other community members. Since health and healing became integrated in societal expectations for women, practicing medicine was a substantially more accepted occupation. Women, rather than men, became the more qualified medical authorities in early modern England.