Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Renaissance Italy by Sharon T. Strocchia (review)

In this richly detailed and wide-ranging monograph, Sharon Strocchia examines the broad variety of female healers in early modern Italy. She opens by noting that numerous scholars—Alisha Rankin, Monica Green, Susan Broomhall, and Mary Fissell, to name only a few of the most prominent authors whom she cites—have established that women were the primary health providers for much of the early modern period. Strocchia adds to this debate on the role of women in early modern healthcare by turning the focus to Italy where, she notes, the scholarship "has been dominated by developments in academic medicine—anatomy, dissection, and humanistic debates" and so women's fundamental roles have been neglected (4). Strocchia's monograph does much more, however, than add another geographic region to our picture of women's roles in the medical profession: Strocchia ranges widely across the social spectrum from the medical practices of Medici Grand Duchesses to the care given by nurses at pox hospitals. In covering such a broad social spectrum, Strocchia contributes to numerous important debates in the history of medicine including, but not limited to, the role of empiricism in medical practice at a number of different social levels, the material culture of medical practice, the varied spaces and commercialization where knowledge of the human body was made, and the role of the senses in diagnosis and treatment.

Strocchia's monograph spans five chapters, each of which focuses on a specific social rank of healers—Strocchia says that she "uses the prism of class as an organizing tool" for her monograph (8). The first chapter uses the example of two elite women in sixteenth-century Florence to demonstrate the centrality of healing knowledge to women with high court positions. Focusing on Maria Salviati (1499–1543), who was the mother of Cosimo I, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Eleonora of Toledo (1522–1562), who was Cosimo's foreign-born wife, Strocchia demonstrates that these women were deeply enmeshed in the medical decision-making and care for those within the Medici household and patronage circles. Salviati became the arbiter of the medical treatment for the Medici children whereas Eleonora instituted a "hierarchical medical culture at court" in which she was in charge of the decisions about care for both her family and clients (48). This medical care formed an important part of Eleonora's courtly strategies, and her medical gifts and charity helped her to overcome opposition to her status as a foreigner and allowed her to fashion herself as a generous and caring patron. For both women, their medical decision-making and patronage was part of their identity and authority at the Medici court.

A central contribution of this book is a demonstration that the convent was a major site of medical knowledge and healthcare. Chapters 2 through 4 accordingly focus on the convent, with chapter 2 examining the ways in which elite women partnered with convent pharmacies, chapter 3 exploring the commercialization of the convent pharmacy, and chapter 4 documenting the ways in which convent pharmacological practices engaged in a sort of growing experimentalism in early modern Europe.

One of the most interesting details to emerge from chapter 2 is the relationship between Queen Leonora of Portugal (1458–1525) and the Florentine nuns in the convent at Le Murate. Leonora used the vast resources of the Portuguese maritime empire to donate hundreds of pounds of sugar each year to Le Murate, where the nuns turned it into medicine. This patronage allowed Leonora to demonstrate her charity on a European scale and appear as a benefactor "within a Catholic charitable economy" (53).

In chapter 3, Strocchia examines several convent pharmacies in Florence to demonstrate that convent pharmacies were both active suppliers to the medical marketplace in early modern Italy and zones of sociability for women of various social strata. Although guild pharmacies had long been recognized as zones of male...