Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In an 1855 address at the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, Dr. Ann Preston reminded students “the scattered records that have come down to us upon the page of history” demonstrate “that women were, quite commonly, the physicians” (216). Dr. Preston and these medical students were heirs of a long tradition of women healers that operated in the Philadelphia region and indelibly shaped its history. Historian Susan Brandt makes this history abundantly clear in Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia and reveals the critical roles women healers played in public and personal healthcare from the founding of the Pennsylvania Colony through the mid-nineteenth century.Women Healers explores the experiences of women who provided medical care to their households and larger communities to argue women were not simple “old wives” blindly following traditional healing practices made obsolete by advances in medicine and business practices (6). Far from it, in the colonial and Early Republic eras, women were at the cutting edge of medicine. Forging complicated trans-Atlantic networks of knowledge that crossed geographic, racial, religious, and class lines, women found new sources of healing authority, thrived in a competitive medical marketplace, resisted attempts from physicians to delegitimize their work, and used their healing skills to advocate for their communities.Brandt uses the term “women healers” broadly to include women who performed a wide variety of paid and unpaid healing work including nurses, apothecaries, druggists, herb sellers, midwives, nentpikes (Lenape healers who provided herbal cures), health educators, doctoresses, and homeopathic physicians. The book includes case studies of well-known and obscure women healers to support her arguments.Chapter 1 begins by locating the roots of women’s healing work in colonial Philadelphia, which Brandt contends are found in “engagement with medical print, the New Science, transatlantic pharmaceutical commerce, and health care consumerism” that migrated with colonists from Europe to North America (40). To prove this, readers are introduced to Gulielma Springett Penn, wife of William Penn and a renowned healer in England (she was never able to travel to Pennsylvania). Brandt closely studies Penn’s medical recipe book, a manuscript women healers created to catalog their medical knowledge and share it with others. Though few recipe books survive in archives today, they are rich resources and unearth women’s “literacy, authorship, medical knowledge production, and engagement” with healing techniques grounded in science and personal experience (23). In this chapter Brandt also argues that Philadelphia’s Quaker-dominated society uniquely enabled women to thrive as healers by allowing them to “appropriate their religious authority to bolster their legitimacy as benevolent medical practitioners” (19). These themes recur frequently throughout the book.Brandt explores the practice and medical recipe book of Elizabeth Coates Paschall in the second chapter. Paschall, a widowed Quaker and business owner, skillfully healed many neighbors from her High Street home in the middle of the eighteenth century. Brandt illustrates Paschall’s work with memorable remedies like an oatmeal, chamomile, sweet oil, and brown sugar enema (or “glister”) for a niece suffering from abdominal pain after childbirth and a recipe for “Children’s Sore heads” that employed beer, butter, and cabbage to draw “the humour from their Eyes & Face” (51). Brandt investigates Paschall’s practice and the origins of her remedies to show she was part of “collaborative and innovative healing exchanges that extended across time and geographic space” (43). This is one of the strongest chapters of the book, due partially to the rich archival sources Brandt incorporates into the text.Following chapters take readers through the lives of more than a dozen other women healers. Hannah Freeman takes center stage in chapter 3. A Lenape from Chester County, her healing practice placed her on a borderland that allowed her and other Indigenous healers to support themselves financially and preserve cultural traditions threatened by encroaching White Pennsylvanians. Chapter 4 returns to Paschall’s story to demonstrate the authority that women healers maintained in Philadelphia, allowing them to resist marginalization by “professional” physicians. Chapters 5 and 6 takes a look at entrepreneurial healers like Elizabeth Weed, an apothecary ironically married to a coffin maker, and Margaret Hill Morris, a financially distressed Quaker healer, who both used their skills to earn comfortable livings. Despite societal taboos against women earning money for healing, their medical authority allowed these healers to leverage consumer demand to “sustain their businesses in a competitive marketplace,” especially during upheavals like the American Revolution (165).Chapter 7 touches on the life of Sarah Bass Allen, a founder of the AME Church and leader of the Free African Society, who nursed ailing Philadelphians to health during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. A slanderous article attacking Black nurses’ actions during the epidemic and a response pamphlet published by Richard Allen provide a backdrop against which Brandt explores how Black healers used their authority to advocate for abolition and “validate African Americans’ worthiness for civil equality” (167). This chapter suffers more egregiously than others from gaps in the historical record and readers will find less about specific Black healing practices and more about late eighteenth-century Black Philadelphia as a whole, a fact Brandt readily admits. Still, she is able to demonstrate the links between healing and “engaging in activist reform movements” clearly (188).Healing Women’s final chapter follows healers as they navigated the evolving landscape of Early Republic Philadelphia and changing ideas about domesticity and acceptable medical practice. This chapter features Elizabeth Marshall, an apothecary who saved her family’s business from financial ruin in the early 1800s. By the time she sold the company twenty years later she had expanded the shop and developed a prosperous drug manufactory. And yet historians “suppressed the memories” of Marshall and so many other women healers, omitting her from published histories and only acknowledging mid-nineteenth-century women with professional medical degrees as the “first women doctors” in Philadelphia (188).Brandt’s scholarship reminds us that, even though women healers were “so ubiquitous they were unremarkable,” they are still obscured in the historical record (214). Factors as varied as oral networks of information sharing, citation practices, appraisal decisions made by families and archival repositories to not preserve records, and even the Republican Motherhood movement leaves us with only “shadowy traces” in archives today (4). Failure of healers (men and women alike) to cite Indigenous and Black healers and patients by name makes their history even more difficult to uncover, a reminder of the serious consequences of not properly citing sources.Despite the gaps in the archival record of women healers, Brandt has been able to pull their history out of every shred of evidence that seems to remain from Philadelphia. Medical recipe books, letters, newspaper advertisements, city directories, and government records from a dozen archives are cited throughout the book and help readers get a grassroots perspective of healing and its impact.Women Healers is a useful volume for anyone interested in the history of medicine, the Philadelphia region, and the experiences of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, it has a lot to teach archivists and librarians about the information seeking, gathering, and sharing behaviors of healers and ordinary people. This book shows the value of the history of women’s healing practices and the value in keeping the receipts that tell these stories.
Source: Pennsylvania history
Author: Tyler Stump
Institution: Pennsylvania State University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4406215730