Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize
A new history uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.
In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life—from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries—drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls’ shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine.
Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular, were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era’s understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe.
Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine.
In Women as Healers, thirteen contributors explore the intersection of feminist anthropology and medical anthropology in eleven case studies of women in traditional and emergent healing roles in diverse parts of the world. In a spectrum of healing roles ranging from family healers to shamans, diviner-mediums, and midwives, women throughout the world pursue strategic ends through healing, manipulate cultural images to effect cures and explain misfortune, and shape and are shaped by the social and political contexts in which they work. In an introductory chapter, Carol Shepherd McClain traces the evolution of ideas in medical anthropology and in the anthropology of women that have both constrained and expanded our understanding of the significance of gender to healing-one of the most fundamental and universal of human activities.
The contributors include Carol Shepherd McClain, Ruthbeth Finerman, Carolyn Nordstrom, Carole H. Browner, William Wedenoja, Marjery Foz, Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, Laurel Kendall, Merrill Signer, Roberto Garcia, Edward C. Green, Carolyn Sargent, and Margaret Reid.
Women Who Live Evil Lives documents the lives and practices of mixed-race, Black, Spanish, and Maya women sorcerers, spell-casters, magical healers, and midwives in the social relations of power in Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of colonial Central America. Men and women from all sectors of society consulted them to intervene in sexual and familial relations and disputes between neighbors and rival shop owners; to counter abusive colonial officials, employers, or husbands; and in cases of inexplicable illness.
Applying historical, anthropological, and gender studies analysis, Martha Few argues that women's local practices of magic, curing, and religion revealed opportunities for women's cultural authority and power in colonial Guatemala. Few draws on archival research conducted in Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain to shed new light on women's critical public roles in Santiago, the cultural and social connections between the capital city and the countryside, and the gender dynamics of power in the ethnic and cultural contestation of Spanish colonial rule in daily life.
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