The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction

C. L. Grace: Kathryn Swinbrook, Fifteenth-Century Physician and Sleuth

C. L. Grace: Kathryn Swinbrook, Fifteenth-Century Physician and Sleuth Jean Coakley A fifteenth-century English woman practicing medicine seems fanciful to many readers. Yet medical historians Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead and Monica Green provide clear evidence for C. L. Grace's portrayal of Kathryn Swinbrooke, Leech and Physician.I Women physicians and surgeons were "openly acknowledged as necessary for the care of the sick and wounded" until universities intellectualized the craft in the thirteenth century, teaching Greek and Arab medical theory and arguing that all practitioners should be male university graduates (Hurd-Mead 265). Despite papal edicts forbidding [them] to practice medicine or surgery under pain of imprisonment ... women doctors continued to practice, with or without registration, in the midst of wars and epidemics as they always had, for the simple reason that they were needed and could not be repressed. (Hurd-Mead 306, Grace's frontispiece) As Grace indicates in the "Author's Note" which prefaces A Shrine of Murders (1993), the first title in the series,2 Kathryn Swinbrooke may be fiction, but in 1322, the most famous doctor in London was Mathilda of Westminster; Cecily of Oxford was the royal physician to Edward III and his wife Phillipa of Hainault; and Gerard of Cremona's work (mentioned in the novel) clearly describes women doctors during the medieval period. In England, particularly, where the medical faculties at the two universities Oxford and Cambridge were relatively weak, women did serve as doctors and apothecaries, professions only in later centuries denied to them. While Henry VII's mother-the formidable Margaret, Countess of Richmond -practiced in her own hospitals, where "she personally attended the needs of patients, dressed the sores of the wounded, and prescribed for the sick" (Hurd-Mead 307), less well-connected women doctors like Grace's protagonist minimized friction with their university-trained colleagues by practicing in poorer neighborhoods, where their services were less well rewarded. C. L. Grace's books include four titles: A Shrine of Murders (1993); The Eye of God (1994); The Merchant of Death (1995); and The Book of 147 148 The Detective as Historian Shadows (1995). Beginning with the first book in the series, which introduces the continuing characters and their milieu, each is built around a Chaucerian analogue and a historical occurrence, both of which play significant roles in plot development. As in Ellis Peters' "Brother Cadfael" series set during an earlier civil war, Kathryn Swinbrooke's pharmaceutical and medical expertise provide the rationale for her involvement in murder. Her first case calls upon her to solve a series of poisonings centered around Canterbury 's most important tourist attraction: the Shrine of St. Thomas a Becket. In others, she is caught up in Court intrigues which place her and those she loves in danger. Each novel interweaves a series of carefully integrated subplots, unobtrusively planting clues while paying close attention to the nuances of psychological motivation. In all four, Grace, a pseudonym for P. C. Doherty, uses a variant on the successful paradigm he has employed in better than three dozen medieval mysteries he has published under a variety of pseudonyms since 1986. Each novel begins with front matter contextualizing the narrative-an overview of "Historical Personages Mentioned in the Text" and a map of the "Main Streets of Canterbury, c. 1471" preceding A Shrine of Murders and a short "Historical Note" ushering in each of the later novels. These are ordinarily followed by Prologues linking the subtleties of milieu and motive to the action which follows. As Shrine opens, for example, the connections between Chaucer, magic, murder, and medicine are palpable: Wizards and warlocks proclaimed it to be a killing time. . . . Strange sights were seen: legions of hags flew through the dark watches of the night, leading convoys of the dead to black sabbaths and blasphemous Masses.... Such whispering spread even to Canterbury itself ... [where s]trange deaths were reported, mysterious fatalities among those who flocked to Canterbury to seek the help of the Blessed Thomas a' Becket, whose battered corpse and cloven skull lay under sheets of gold before the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. . . . In the west ... Margaret of Anjou ... plotted with her generals to seize the throne for her witless husband. . . . In London, Edward of York ... drew up subtle plans against the She-Wolf's approach ... and plotted the total destruction of the entire House of Lancaster. Truly a killing time, and those who could remembered the somber lines of Chaucer's poem about "The smiling...