Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800

Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800
Author: L. Whaley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2011-02-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230295177

Women have engaged in healing from the beginning of history, often within the context of the home. This book studies the role, contributions and challenges faced by women healers in France, Spain, Italy and England, including medical practice among women in the Jewish and Muslim communities, from the later Middle Ages to approximately 1800.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
Author: Jane Couchman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 573
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317041054

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women’s lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.

Infertility in Early Modern England

Infertility in Early Modern England
Author: Daphna Oren-Magidor
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2017-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137476680

This book explores the experiences of people who struggled with fertility problems in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. Motherhood was central to early modern women’s identity and was even seen as their path to salvation. To a lesser extent, fatherhood played an important role in constructing proper masculinity. When childbearing failed this was seen not only as a medical problem but as a personal emotional crisis. Infertility in Early Modern England highlights the experiences of early modern infertile couples: their desire for children, the social stigmas they faced, and the ways that social structures and religious beliefs gave meaning to infertility. It also describes the methods of treating fertility problems, from home-remedies to water cures. Offering a multi-faceted view, the book demonstrates the centrality of religion to every aspect of early modern infertility, from understanding to treatment. It also highlights the ways in which infertility unsettled the social order by placing into question the gendered categories of femininity and masculinity.

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe
Author: Anna Bellavitis
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3319965417

In the last decades, women’s role in the workforce has dramatically changed, though gender inequality persists and for women, gender identity still prevails over work identity. It is important not to forget or diminish the historical role of women in the labour market though and this book proposes a critical overview of the most recent historical research on women’s roles in economic urban activities. Covering a wide area of early modern Europe, from Portugal to Poland and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Bellavitis presents an overview of the economic rights of women – property, inheritance, management of their wealth, access to the guilds, access to education – and assesses the evolution of female work in different urban contexts.

Gendered Touch

Gendered Touch
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-06-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9004512616

The history of science, the history of women, and gender history – Gendered Touch offers new perspectives on the intersections between the textual and the embodied nature of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe.

Civic Medicine

Civic Medicine
Author: J. Andrew Mendelsohn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317021398

Communities great and small across Europe for eight centuries have contracted with doctors. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and global Europe and when civic doctors were central to the rise of shared, organized written information about the human and natural world. This opens the prospect of a long history of knowledge and action shaped more by community and responsibility than market or state, exchange or power.

Women in White Coats

Women in White Coats
Author: Olivia Campbell
Publisher: Harlequin
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2021-03-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1488073929

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care. In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society. Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women. With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.

Both from the Ears and Mind

Both from the Ears and Mind
Author: Linda Phyllis Austern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022670467X

Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Linda Phyllis Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Music was considered both art and science, and discussions of music and musical terminology provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning. This book demonstrates how knowledge of music permitted individuals to both reveal and conceal membership in specific social, intellectual, and ideological communities. Attending to materials that go beyond music’s conventional limits, these chapters probe the role of music in commonplace books, health-maintenance and marriage manuals, rhetorical and theological treatises, and mathematical dictionaries. Ultimately, Austern illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change.

Reimagining Illness

Reimagining Illness
Author: Heather Meek
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2023-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022801980X

In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses. In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers – Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney – alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of women’s bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility. Reimagining Illness offers a new account of the vital period in medico-literary history between 1660 and 1815, revealing how the works of women writers not only represented the medicine of their time but also contributed meaningfully to its developments.