Locations

Joseph Du Chesne, Quercetanus redivivus, hoc est Ars medica dogmatico hermetica, ex scriptis Josephi Quercetani … tomis tribus digesta: quorum I. Ars medica mediatrix, II. Ars medica auxiliatrix, III. Ars medica practica. Operâ Joannis Schröderi (Frankfurt, 1648), title page vignette.

This vignette, from the title page of Worth’s copy of Joseph Du Chesne’s Quercetanus redivivus … (Frankfurt, 1648), reminds us of two things: the importance of domestic medicine and the vital role played by women in providing health care in the home. Though men might, on occasion, take a role, the burden of domestic health care more usually fell on the female members of the household. Familial recipe books, handed down from generation to generation or started afresh, codified the family’s (and wider community’s) knowledge of what worked in practice.[1] As Kelly argues, recipe books might be viewed as a ‘practical manifestation of the fact that, since domestic medication was an intrinsic feature of household management, the organization of medical care within the household, like the organization of diet, was a primarily a female responsibility’.[2]

Crucial also was the provision of printed guides specifically devoted to medical practice, texts which sought to improve access to both old and new medical practices and encourage their application in the home.[3] As Stobart has demonstrated, many remedies mentioned in the proliferating recipe books of the period were herbal in nature, and the same was true of printed guides.[4] In addition, treatments that would have been familiar to Galen, such as bleeding and purging, still retained their popularity. Chymical cures might also be bought made up from apothecaries, or experimented on in the domestic setting. Print brought texts on these different medical approaches to a wider audience – an audience, moreover, which was dependent on self-medication given the dearth of licensed physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. As Christian III (1503–59), king of Denmark and Norway, ruefully remarked, ‘there was a severe shortage of physicians and good apothecaries in his kingdom which caused many of the king’s subjects and visitors to these parts to die of neglect when they fell ill’.[5] It was a sentiment which might have been expressed by any monarch of the period. While physicians, eager to man the barricades of their professional authority, might decry such self-medication, some were, as Kelly notes, eager to make some medical knowledge available to patients. The early eighteenth-century Dublin physician Edward Worth (1676–1733), was clearly interested in this medical genre and bought a number of these vernacular texts on the practice of medicine.

Hopîtal des Frères de la Charité, Paris: Anne of Austria visiting the charitable work of the monks. Line engraving by Abraham Bosse. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Women also worked in the wider community as licensed mid-wives or as non-licenced medical practitioners. An important role of many female health care professionals at the time was as nurses, both in the home, wider community, or in hospitals. In her study of imperial towns in the Holy Roman Empire, Kinzelbach demonstrates the wide variety of roles women played in hospitals: as nurses and administrators.[6] The Meisterin in large German hospitals not only supervised nurses but also oversaw the economic underpinning of the institutions, ensuring provisions were available for patients.[7] In tandem with the Kunsterin, both supervised nurses care of patients, and, on the death of their husbands, some women might continue as Hofmeisterin.[8] As Kinzelbach dryly notes, it was left up to the female staff to ‘cook, prepare and administer the medicaments and baths, prepare the diet, feed the sick and put them to bed, wash their bedding and clothes’.[9]

Jean Pascal, Traité des eaux de Bourbon l’Archambaud selon les principes de la nouvelle physique… (Paris, 1699), title page.

Print also drew patients’ attention to the benefits of drinking mineral waters and bathing at spas – courses of action which appealed to those wary of some chymical cures.[10] Certainly spas of all kinds were on the rise in early modern Europe. Worth was clearly interested in this development, owning works on a host of French, English and German spas which had been published by resident physicians to promote their use. He likewise acquired tracts about famous Irish spas which rose to prominence during his own lifetime: Chapelizod in Dublin, which had been extolled in Pierre Bellon’s The Irish spaw, being a short discourse on mineral waters in general: with a way of improving by art weakly impregnated mineral waters: and a brief account of the mineral waters at Chappel-izod near Dublin … (Dublin, 1684), and Ballyspellan in Co. Kilkenny which was the subject of his copy of John Taafe, The Irish Spaw, or Ballispallan Water (Dublin, 1724). He would have been well aware that examination of mineral waters was not the preserve of physicians based at individual spas or at the royal courts, but was also undertaken by members of the scientific societies and universities of the period.

The exploration of the chemical attributes of mineral waters was a drop in the ocean of early modern drug testing, which, as Leong and Rankin have observed, took place in a host of locations: at home as part of domestic health care; in early modern hospitals; and in both universities and scientific societies.[11] The thirteenth-century physician Bernard de Gordon (c. 1260–c. 1318), had identified hospital patients as a particularly useful cohort for testing drugs (probably because they were poor), and by the seventeenth century drug testing on hospital patients had become regularised, particularly in military hospitals.[12] Of course hospitals were not the only location where such experimental drug testing might take place: universities and scientific societies provided ideal locations to explore the properties of new compounds.[13] Worth would have been well aware of this for the University of Leiden, his old alma mater, had been an important venue for new drug trials in the seventeenth century, especially during the time of one of Leiden’s most famous teachers, Frans de Le Boë, (1614–72).[14]

Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.

Sources

Grell, Ole Peter, and Andrew Cunningham, ‘The Reformation and changes in welfare provision in early modern Northern Europe’, in Grell, Ole Peter, and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Health care and poor relief in Protestant Europe 1500–1700, Studies in the Social History of Medicine (London and New York, 1997), pp 1–41.

Kelly, James, ‘Domestic Medication and Medical Care in Late Early Modern Ireland’, in Kelly, James, and Fiona Clark (eds), Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2010), pp 109–35.

Kinzelbach, Annemarie, ‘Women and healthcare in early modern German towns’, Renaissance Studies, 28, no. 4 (2014), 619–38.

Leong, Elaine and Alisha Rankin, ‘Testing Drugs and Trying Cures’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91, no. 2 (2017), 157–82.

Ragland, Evan R., ‘Experimental Clinical Medicine and Drug Action in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Leiden’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91, no. 2 (2017), 331–61.

Stobart, Anne, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New York, 2016).

[1] Kelly, James, ‘Domestic Medication and Medical Care in Late Early Modern Ireland’, in Kelly, James, and Fiona Clark (eds), Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2010), p. 122, makes the point that recipe books might also be communal in the sense that relatives and friends were often eager to share their recipes with the wider community for the public good.

[2] Ibid., p. 119.

[3] Ibid., p. 110.

[4] On domestic medicine generally see Stobart, Anne, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New York, 2016).

[5] Grell, Ole Peter, and Andrew Cunningham, ‘The Reformation and changes in welfare provision in early modern Northern Europe’, in Grell, Ole Peter, and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Health care and poor relief in Protestant Europe 1500–1700, Studies in the Social History of Medicine (London and New York, 1997), p. 20.

[6] Kinzelbach, Annemarie, ‘Women and healthcare in early modern German towns’, Renaissance Studies, 28, no. 4 (2014), 619–38.

[7] Ibid., 623.

[8] Ibid., 624.

[9] Ibid., 625.

[10] Kelly, ‘Domestic Medication and Medical Care in Late Early Modern Ireland’, p. 111.

[11] Leong, Elaine and Alisha Rankin, ‘Testing Drugs and Trying Cures’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91, no. 2 (2017), 175.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 176.

[14] On this see Ragland, Evan R., ‘Experimental Clinical Medicine and Drug Action in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Leiden’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91, no. 2 (2017), 331–61.