Book ID: CBB316490420

Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (2022)

unapi

Brandt, Susan Hanket (Author)


University of Pennsylvania Press


Publication Date: 2022
Physical Details: 312
Language: English

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries.Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphia’s Female Medical College, the first women’s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women’s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women’s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women’s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures.Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

...More
Reviewed By

Review Sarah Naramore (2023) Review of "Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 202-203). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB316490420/

Similar Citations

Article Halpern, Paul; (2008)
Philadelphia: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Physics

Book Esther Sahle; (2021)
Quakers in the British Atlantic world, c.1660-1800

Article Verplanck, Anne; (2015)
“They Carry Their Religion . . . into Every Act of Their Public and Private Lives”: Quaker Consumption of Early Photographic Images in Philadelphia, 1839--1860

Article Daniel J. Flanagan; (2018)
Earliest Known Black Graduates of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy

Book D'Antonio, Patricia; (2006)
Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia

Book Finger, Simon; (2012)
The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia

Article Peitzman, Steven J.; (2003)
Why Support a Women's Medical College? Philadelphia's Early Male Medical Pro-Feminists

Article Halpern, Paul; (2009)
Philadelphia: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Physics

Thesis Osborn, Matthew Warner; (2007)
The Anatomy of Intemperance: Alcohol and the Diseased Imagination inPhiladelphia, 1784--1860

Thesis Anroman, Gilda Marie; (2006)
Infectious Disease in Philadelphia, 1690--1807: An Ecological Perspective

Thesis Klein, Katherine Okuda; (2002)
The growth of man-midwifery in Philadelphia and its environs, 1765--1848

Article Hallett, Christine; (2005)
The Attempt to Understand Puerperal Fever in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Influence of Inflammation Theory

Article Schlumbohm, Jürgen; (2007)
The Practice of Practical Education: Male Students and Female Apprentices in the Lying-In Hospital of Göttingen University, 1792--1815

Article Steven King; (2015)
Nursing Under the Old Poor Law in Midland and Eastern England 1780–1834

Book Sonja M. Kim; (2019)
Imperatives of care : Women and medicine in colonial Korea

Book Cabré, Montserrat; Ortiz, Teresa; (2001)
Sanadoras, Matronas y Médicas en Europa

Article Hickey, Daniel; (2010)
To Improve the Training of Nurses in France: The Manuals Published as Teaching-Aids, 1775--1895

Thesis Parzynski, Catherine S.; (2004)
Maternal Medicine: Changing Perceptions of Women's Place in Medicine, Settlement to 1860

Article Kopperman, Paul E.; (2004)
“Venerate the Lancet”: Benjamin Rush's Yellow Fever Therapy in Context

Article Leach, Camilla; (2006)
Religion and Rationality: Quaker Women and Science Education 1790--1850

Authors & Contributors
Halpern, Paul
Anroman, Gilda Marie
Cabré, Montserrat
D'Antonio, Patricia O'Brien
Finger, Simon
Hallett, Christine E.
Journals
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Medical History
Physics in Perspective
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
Early American Studies
History of Education
Publishers
Lehigh University
Cornell University Press
Icaria
Lehigh University Press
University of California, Davis
University of Maryland, College Park
Concepts
Medicine
Women in medicine
Quakers and Quakerism
Medical education and teaching
Childbirth
Nurse midwives
People
Franklin, Benjamin
Rush, Benjamin
Hack, Maria
Wakefield, Priscilla
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
17th century
20th century
Medieval
Modern
Places
Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, U.S.)
United States
England
Pennsylvania (U.S.)
Europe
France
Institutions
Universität Göttingen
University of Pennsylvania
University of the Sciences in Philadelphia
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment