Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and TreatmentThis investigation contributes to the existing scholarship on women and medicine in early modern Britain by examining the diagnosis and treatment of female patients by male professional medical practitioners from 1590 to 1740. In order to obtain a clearer understanding of female illness and medicine during this period, this study examines ailments that were specific and unique to female patients as well as illnesses and conditions that afflicted both female and male patients. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of practitioners' records and patients' writings - such as casebooks, diaries and letters - an emphasis is placed on medical practice. Despite the prevalence of females amongst many physicians' casebooks and the existence of sex-based differences in the consultations, diagnoses and treatments of patients, there is no evidence to indicate that either the health or the medical care of females was distinctly disadvantaged by the actions of male practitioners. Instead, the diagnoses and treatments of women were premised on a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of the female body than has previously been implied within the historiography. In turn, their awareness and appreciation of the unique features of female anatomy and physiology meant that male practitioners were sympathetic and accommodating to the needs of individual female patients during this pivotal period in British medicine. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Gendered Clienteles Illnesses and Relationships
| 39 |
2 The Treatment of FemaleSpecific Complaints by Male Hands
| 91 |
Women Men and Disease in Early Modern British Medical Practice
| 141 |
Medical Diagnosis of Womens Minds Bodies and Emotions
| 179 |
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Common terms and phrases
amongst Anatomy of Melancholy appears Beier BL Sl breast ailments Cambridge cancer Carver to Colebrook century Chapter chlorosis Colebrook Crawford diagnosis and treatment Discourse Diseases of Maids disorders Dr Carver early eighteenth-century early modern Britain Early Modern England early modern medical evidence examination female body female patients female-specific gendered George Cheyne George Colebrook History of Medicine hypochondria Ibid instance Jean Astruc John London Practice MacDonald male patients male practitioners manuscript Medical Casebook medical practice medical theory medical treatment Medicinal Dictionary melancholy menarche menopause menstrual cycles menstruation Midwives Mystical Bedlam Pechey physician pregnancy professional RCPMS regarding Roy Porter sexual Siena Sloane Sloane’s smallpox social socio-economic Sufferers and Healers surgeon surgical symptoms Thomas Sydenham Thomas Willis Trapham venereal disease Voyage Ward and Yell Wellcome MS 3631 Wellcome MS 5006 Wellcome MS 6888 Wellcome MS 6919 William Willis Willis’s Oxford Casebook woman women Women’s Health Yell eds