Women healers : gender, authority, and medicine in early Philadelphia / Susan H. Brandt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brandt, Susan Hanket, author.

Series:

Early American studies.

Early American studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women in medicine--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History--18th century.

Women in medicine.

Women healers--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History--18th century.

Women healers.

Minorities in medicine--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History--18th century.

Minorities in medicine.

Medicine--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History--18th century.

Medicine.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (312 pages)

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Figure 1

Introduction

Chapter 1. Healing Legacies

Chapter 2. Medical Networks

Chapter 3. Healing Borderlands

Chapter 4. The Authority of Science

Chapter 5. Medical Entrepreneurship

Chapter 6. Marketing Health

Chapter 7. The Fevered Racial Politics of Healing

Chapter 8. Navigating New Challenges

Epilogue. A Well-Trodden Path

Glossary

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Brandt, Susan H. Women Healers

ISBN:

9780812298475

OCLC:

1293242698