Medicine for the Uncommon Woman: Experience, Experiment, and Exchange in Early Modern Germany (2005)
Rankin, Alisha Michelle (Author)
Harvard University
Park, Katharine
Edition Details: Advisor: Park, Katharine
Physical Details: 371 pp.
Language: English
This study focuses on the prominence of noblewomen as medical experts within the vibrant culture of therapeutic exchange in early modern Germany. Using case studies of three well-documented noblewomen, Countess Dorothea of Mansfeld (1493-1578), Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz (1502-57), and Electress Anna of Saxony (1532-85), I demonstrate the central role of women's healing in early modern court culture. The dissertation has three main aims. First, it counters the notion that women's medicine in pre-modern Europe was either a unitary or a marginal enterprise. Even the very phrase "women's medicine" ignores both the wide range of medical practices in which women were involved and the importance that other factors, especially class hierarchies and marital status, played alongside preconceptions of gender. Second, I show that influential lay categories of knowledge and authority in early modern Germany did not necessarily privilege the book learning of physicians. Like most laypeople, elite women took an experiential approach to medicine, using empirical skill and proven efficacy as markers of a cure's success. Finally, I propose that the medical activities of noblewomen at court should be viewed as part of a broader experimental culture among sixteenth-century aristocrats. Their focus on experience and hands-on testing closely mirrored experimental endeavors that have already been documented among German noblemen---indeed, elite women and men frequently shared ideas with one another. Unlike the inductive experimentation that would evolve in the seventeenth century as part of what is now called the Scientific Revolution, however, court experimentalism was not driven by the search for an underlying natural philosophy. The activites outlined here occurred alongside a growing print tradition of medical works aimed at the "common man." However, it is in manuscript sources, not in printed works, that rich evidence of women's medical activities can be found. Although specific cases differed starkly, healing was simply one aspect of the everyday life of noblewomen, part of their overall household and charitable duties. Using letters, collections of medical recipes, estate inventories, and account books, I demonstrate that the medical activities in which these "uncommon" women engaged were not only respected, they were also desired and expected.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/11 (2006): 4163. UMI pub. no. 3194447.
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