Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia

Susan H. Brandt

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 2022

Women Healers

Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia

Susan H. Brandt

In the series Early American Studies

https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812298475

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Susan H. Brandt is a Lecturer in the Department of History at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Figure 1 Publicly Available Download PDF	viii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Healing Legacies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
Chapter 2. Medical Networks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
Chapter 3. Healing Borderlands Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
Chapter 4. The Authority of Science Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
Chapter 5. Medical Entrepreneurship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
Chapter 6. Marketing Health Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
Chapter 7. The Fevered Racial Politics of Healing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
Chapter 8. Navigating New Challenges Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Epilogue. A Well-Trodden Path Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 336
Illustrations
- Other: 11 halftones, 1 map
Keywords: American History; American Studies; Books of Regional Interest

eBook

Published: April 15, 2022
ISBN: 9780812298475