Housewives As Healers

Overview

Para1Women provided much of the basic medical care that people received in early modern England. In addition to household duties such as growing, storing, and preparing food, a housewife in 16th and 17th century England cared for her family’s (including any servants or laborers) basic and routine medical needs. Robert Greene, a rival of William Shakespeare, once claimed in A Quip for an Upstart Courtier) that but for myself, if I be ill at ease I take kitchen physic; I make my wife my doctor and my garden my apothecary’s shop.

Instruction in Healing

Para2Many books were published in the period that featured instructions for women who needed to prepare and administer medicine. Thomas Tusser’s 1580 rhyming set of lessons Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry offers many remedies that women with limited literacy could memorize; it was published in 23 editions between 1567 and 1641. Another popular book, Gervase Markham’s 1615 volume, The English Housewife, notes that:
To begin then with one of the most principal virtues which doth belong to our English housewife: you shall understand that since the preservation and care of the family, touching their health and soundness of body, consisteth most in her diligence, it is meet fitting that she have a physical kind of knowledge, how to administer many wholesome receipts recipes or medicines for the good of their healths, as well as to prevent the first occasion of sickness as to take away the effects and evil of the same when it hath made a seizure on the body.
Para3But women mainly learned medical craft from their mothers or other women in the family, friends, or neighbors. They prepared with homegrown ingredients for or obtained from apothecaries the oils, ointments, syrups, and other treatments needed for all standard illnesses and injuries. They frequently distilled medicines and administered medical treatment for infections, burns, fractures, and fevers, in addition to acting as birth attendants or even delivering babies in place of midwives.

Treatments

Para4Early modern housewives were trusted sources of medical treatment in ther period. They knew how to clean wounds, treat fevers, bind broken bones, and use herbal remedies for a variety of conditions. Women regularly record handwritten recipes for the remedies they used in the diaries and letters that survive. For example, willow bark (the salicylic acid from which was eventually purified into aspirin) was known to treat pain, but bay, lavender, rose, and sage were also used for headaches. Herbs like comfrey were used for lung conditions, and mint and wormwood for stomach ailments.

Key Print Sources

Fissel, Mary Elizabeth. Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe.Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 82, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 1–17.
Green, Monica H. Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. Ashgate, 2000.
Markham, Gervase, and Michael R. Best. The English Housewife. McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994.
Porter, Roy. Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1995.
The Healing Arts: Health, Disease, and Society in Europe, 1500–1800. edited by Peter Elmer, Manchester UP, 2004.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. In Sickness and in Health…. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/sickness.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Strocchia, Sharon T. Introduction: Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe. Renaissance Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, Sep. 2014, pp. 496–514. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24423851.
Tusser, Thomas. Five Hundred Points of Husbandry (1580). Edited by W. Payne and Sydney Herttage, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/fivehundredpoint08tussuoft/fivehundredpoint08tussuoft_djvu.txt. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Housewives As Healers
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.