This text combines detailed research with a clear presentation of the existing literature of women's medical work, making it useful to students of gender and medical history.

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 Medical World of Early Modern France recounts the history of medicine in France between the sixteenth century and the French Revolution. Physicians, surgeons and apothecaries are centre-stage, and the study provides an overview of long-term changes in their ideas about medicine and their craft. Other denizens of the medical world - quacks, charlatans, wise women, midwives, herbalist and others - are also brought into the analysis, which is set within the broader context of social, economic, demographic and cultural change. The breadth of the chronological and analytical framework, and the depth of the archival research behind it, makes this a unique account of the evolution of medical ideas and practices in one of the major countries of early modern Europe.

This fourth edition of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks's prize-winning survey features significant changes to every chapter, designed to reflect the newest scholarship. Global issues have been threaded throughout the book, while still preserving the clear thematic structure of previous editions. Thus readers will find expanded discussions of gendered racial hierarchies, migration, missionaries, and consumer goods. In addition, there is enhanced coverage of recent theoretical directions; the ideas, beliefs, and practices of ordinary people; early industrialization; women's learning, letter writing, and artistic activities; emotions and sentiments; single women and same-sex relations; masculinities; mixed-race and enslaved women; and the life course from birth to death. With geographically broad coverage, including Russia, Scandinavia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula, this remains the leading text on women and gender in Europe in this period. Accompanying this essential reading is a completely revised website featuring extensive updated bibliographies, web links, and primary source material.

"In Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment Lindsay Wilson takes a new approach to the social history of medicine by focusing on the key role that women played as both providers and recipients of health care during the Ancien Regime. Wilson pays special attention to three medical controversies involving maladies des femmes in eighteenth-century France: the "miraculous cures" claimed by the Convulsionaries of St. Medard, the uncertainty over the maximum length of pregnancy (and its implications for the legitimacy of heirs) and the debate over the medical effectiveness of mesmerism." "Wilson's analysis of these debates reveals how social and political concerns affected the medical community's efforts to establish an enlightened science of medicine which would, in turn, legitimize its own authority. But because the issues of legitimacy, hierarchy and authority raised by the medical causes celebres resonated so deeply throughout French society, debate extended far beyond medical circles to an increasingly engaged public. Such debate reflected a significant shift in the center of politics from the institutions of court, academy, and parlement to journals, theaters, and the streets." "Wilson's description of these debates provides insight into the forces that were transforming the family, the church, corporate society, and the state on the eve of the Revolution. She argues for a re-assessment of a period that has been all too easily categorized as an age of triumph - either for enlightenment or for repression. Her work also offers concrete examples of the ways in which sexual symbolism can he employed to maintain social order or promote change. Based on medical treatises, medical topographies, official reports, judicial documents, physicians' correspondence, and memoirs of eighteenth-century women, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment is a thoroughly interdisciplinary work that will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social history of medicine, women's studies, Enlightenment thought, and French social history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In the wake of new interest in alchemy as more significant than a bizarre aberration in rational Western European culture, this collection examines both alchemical and medical discourses in the larger context of early modern Europe. How do early scientific discourses infiltrate other cultural domains such as literature, philosophy, court life, and the conduct of households? How do these new contexts deflect scientific pursuits into new directions, and allow a larger participation in the elaboration of scientific methods and perspectives? Might there have been a scientific subculture, particularly surrounding alchemy, which allowed women to participate in scientific pursuits long before they were admitted in an investigative capacity into official academic settings? This volume poses those questions, as a starting point for a broader discussion of scientific subcultures and their relationship to the restructuring and questioning of gender roles.

Employing an innovative range of materials from written sources to artworks, material objects, heritage sites and urban precincts, and combining historical, historiographical, museological, and touristic analysis, this study investigates how late medieval and early modern women of the Low Countries expressed themselves, how they were represented by contemporaries, and how they have been interpreted in modern academic and popular contexts.