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women practitioners.
7
Like the “tongue-tied” (1.2.28) queen Hermione, women
healers during this period generally had no voice, and could
hardly change the common (patriarchal) view that they were
ignorant, of a lower social class, and even evil. They were, of
course, largely absent from the official medical documents
produced by male practitioners: “the records of proceedings at
the College of Physicians, the reports of the Barber-Surgeons’
Company, and various printed works” (Harkness, 2008: 53).
As it was mainly male authors of medical works who made the
often-cited insulting comments about female healers in the
early modern period, women practitioners “were seldom
identified by occupational titles in surviving records, and
therefore the breadth of their activities is only now being
teased out” (Fissell, 2008: 6). Indeed, women healers are
largely absent from medical records as far back as the Middle
Ages, having been not only deprived of a medical education at
universities and “excluded from guild-based work” but more
generally “seen as [being] outside the central tripartite
structure of early modern medicine” (Fissell, 2008: 6).
While historians have tended to base their views on the
documents of the College of Physicians, the Barbar-Surgeons’
Company, and the prestigious male physicians,
8
documents
which rigorously object to the notion of female practitioners,
Deborah E. Harkness has looked at records coming from the
streets, in particular parishes, and from the hospitals staffed by
women healers. Harkness concludes that these Elizabethan
women healers “were at the very heart of London’s medical
world. They were not marginal, they were not laughable, and
7
According to Pelling and Webster, “women practitioners must often have
been described as midwives, or keepers of women in childbed” (1979:
183-184).
8
Those eminent physicians of the period, according to Harkness, include John
Securis, John Hall, and William Clowes. See Harkness (2008: 53-68).