Gender and Domestic Medicine: Analysis of a Seventeenth-Century Receipt Book

Abstract

Research into how men and women participated in domestic medicine, or medicine in the home, has typically focused on the female experience. Indeed, early modern historians have often dichotomized medicine in the early modern period into two domains: male professional medicine and female domestic medicine. While some overlap between the domains is generally acknowledged, the broad generalizations remain standard in current research. In this thesis I build upon new research and examine the ways that men actively participated in domestic medicine and compare this with female participation. A medical recipe book compiled by one woman in the mid- to late-seventeenth-century provides the basis of this research. I examine similarities and differences in ways that men and women shared knowledge and participated in experimentation via their recipes, methods each used to assign credibility to the contributed recipes, and the diseases that were considered important. The results show that men did participate in medicine in each of the ways mentioned above, albeit at different rates than women.