Women's Medical Work in Early Modern France (review)

Building upon Natalie Zemon Davis's pioneering studies and upon more recent work by Marjorie Green, Alison Klairmont Lingo, and others, Susan Broomhall explores the world of women in medicine in France during a very "long" sixteenth century (1460–1630). She considers nine contexts in as many chapters that might well stand as independent studies but that also form a complementary mosaic. Broomhall deals with women as medical practitioners within constraints imposed by male guilds of barber-surgeons and university medical faculties, and with female nursing in hospitals and domestic settings. Other chapters take up the medical knowledge accessible to and sometimes produced by women in the new medium of printed literature, female caregivers at royal courts, and women's intimate understanding of reproduction and birthing.

Broomhall defines medical work broadly to include all activities related to health maintenance, such as providing food, tending to hygiene and basic necessities for families and neighbors, and nursing children, the elderly, and the indigent. At the risk of anachronism, she identifies women as "health-providers" and purveyors of "primary care," and she challenges her readers to accept "work" as comprising more than legally recognized and remunerative occupational status. Would women themselves, or those whom they aided, recognize as "medical" the tasks inspired by Christian charity or domestic duty? Assuming that they would leads Broomhall to describe her project as one that "decentralizes" (pp. 6–7) medical work, discourses, and historiography away from the customary focus on masculine actors and sources.

Broomhall's study ranges from Paris to remote villages (and in one chapter, to the Bourbon princesses at the Spanish court) as she looks at a cross-section of French society from peasantry to royalty. Two case histories she has uncovered are particularly revealing: Isabelle Estevent of Reims, and Jeanne Lescalier of Anjou. In 1462 Isabelle Estevent's husband, an elderly master barber, decided to become a hermit, and willed his practice to his wife. The barber-surgeons' guild of Reims eventually managed to have this contract voided, but the affair occupied the courts for two years. It remains unclear whether Isabelle herself worked as a barber-surgeon. Guild regulations had no such provision, but they did allow widows to lease a deceased husband's shop, tools, and clientele to a journeyman barber-surgeon known as a "privileged" surgeon. Probably Isabelle—although she was divorced, not widowed—wished to retain this privilege for her son, who eventually entered the guild. In any case, the significance of the episode lies in the rich evidence afforded the historian of one woman's claims and the guild's counterclaims.

The Lescalier case, a century later, pitted Jeanne Lescalier against the physicians of Angers in a legal battle lasting more than ten years and reaching the highest Paris court. Here there was no doubt that the woman enjoyed a flourishing practice as a herbalist and healer. Although she too ultimately lost her case, with mitigating circumstances, her lawyer capably defended her, making good use of patients' testimonies, while the physicians' advocate sought unsuccessfully to brand her as a witch.

Broomhall contends that the hands-on experience of women medical workers—whether illiterate peasants, nuns, children's caregivers, or royal midwives of the stature of Louise Bourgeois—gave them an advantage over learned male practitioners. The argument by epistemology works best when women practitioners are contrasted with university physicians. It is less satisfactory with respect to barber-surgeons or apothecaries, who, as Broomhall demonstrates, typically instructed their wives and other family members, or at least gave them opportunities to learn their craft. On the other hand, during this period medical guilds had increasing success in regulating unlicensed practitioners, including women, and prosecuting offenders.

This study is a model of careful historical research. Cautious suggestions and nuanced reasoning are everywhere in evidence. Rather than a formal conclusion, Broomhall ends with an "afterword" calling for ongoing discussion. She makes a strong case for the...