Housewives As Healers Housewives As Healers Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Published file. Updated metadata proofed updated author respStmt. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Created File.
Overview

Women 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

Many 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.

But 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

Early 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.