Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (review)

The essays collected here by Lilian Furst, professor of comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are part of a much-needed, fairly recent effort to extend the history of women in Western medicine back beyond the early modern period. In 1989, Monica Green (who, unfortunately, is not represented among these authors) published a pathbreaking essay, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” ¹ that still serves as the standard introduction to recent work in the field (she is cited several times in the present volume). These essays represent a relatively uncommon effort to amalgamate the work of historians, classicists, and literary scholars, to generally good effect. But, judged against the practices of most historical essay collections, this volume’s organization seems a bit untidy. The essays in Part 1 touch on the role of women in European and English health care from the early middle ages to the Renaissance, but also include a discussion of the informal healing traditions of twentieth-century Afro-American women by Gunilla T. Kester. Part 2 focuses exclusively on women in the medical profession in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Australia, Great Britain, and the United States, but begins with classicist Holt N. Parker’s extremely important discussion of women physicians as “an everyday part of the ancient world” (p. 131). Since Part 1 does include some discussion of women as physicians, Parker’s essay should certainly have been placed at the beginning—for both chronological and thematic coherence.

Essays in Part 1 by Debra L. Stoudt, Nancy P. Nenno, Esther Zago, and Michael Solomon together create an impression of general agreement on several points: women lay healers and medical practitioners (monastic and lay) flourished relatively unhindered until approximately the early thirteenth century, at which time however, the combined forces of monastic reform, the establishment of university medical curricula, and competition between church and states over control of the universities contributed to an increased intolerance and marginalization of women healers—lay and monastic alike. The upheavals and depopulation resulting from the black plague temporarily disrupted these trends, however, since physicians of any stripe were in short supply. But by the sixteenth century, professionalization and the increased lay control of universities’ medical curricula produced a renewed marginalization of lay healers, including many women, and a hostility to women matriculants. Yet, as William Kerwin’s fine analysis of the role of women healers in English Renaissance drama reveals, at least in England women continued to practice widely, despite fierce opposition from the College of Physicians. Invoking the work of Margaret Pelling, Charles Webster, Brian Nance, and Harold J. Cook, Kerwin describes sixteenth-century women practitioners as numerous and argues that they functioned as far more than midwives. Despite being pushed out of “the dominant medical discourse and into the symbolic role of a threatening other,” many women played a role akin to that of the general practitioner, combining the functions of the midwife and the “wise woman” (p. 99).

In Part 2, with the exception of Parker’s article described above, the essays address the situation of women physicians in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Great Britain, the United States, and Australia. Regina Morantz-Sanchez contributes another fine essay on Dr. Mary Dixon-Jones. Alison Bashford’s excellent discussion of all-women’s hospitals in Australia and Great Britain sheds a revealing light on the differences between the women’s medical movements in the two countries, as well as differences between them both and the United States. She notes that British and Australian male physicians were repelled by an image—a caricature, actually—of “stridency and radicalism” among American women physicians; Australian women thus were careful to associate their hospitals with British rather than American models (p. 201). Elsa Nettels orchestrates a compelling alliance between literary criticism and historical contextualization in a discussion of the effects of Virginia Woolf’s experiences as a patient on her writings on male and female physicians.

Lilian...