Book Review : Women's medical work in early modern France

Susan Broomhall's Women's medical work in early modern France takes a diverse look at women's roles in Renaissance health care. She investigates the spaces available to midwives, wives of master surgeons, governesses, nurses, nuns, queens and female healers. In the period under study (1460 to 1630) male control of medical knowledge grew in certain spheres, such as guilds and universities, but women continued to have a dominant role in pregnancy, child rearing and charitable work. Building on the theoretical examination of modern medicine and gender by Londa Schiebinger, Sandra Harding and Ludmilla Jordanova, among others, her book looks at an earlier period in order to examine, in Toril Moi's words, the “variability of gender as a social factor”. To do this, she relies heavily on the work of Alison Klairmont Lingo, as well as her own primary research. The most interesting sections of Broomhall's book are her chapters on childcare and reproductive knowledge. Women had previously been delegated to care for the community's orphans, but with humanism's greater stress on the importance of children came greater emphasis on the quality of that care. Instead of excluding women from paediatric concerns, medical specialists and government officials reinforced their importance and competence based on their experience as mothers. In the sphere of the court (both French and Spanish are examined) elite women used their maternal authority as much as their class status to impose their opinions on physicians and kings. And yet, in certain cases, these women were not able to control their own offspring's care. Diane de Poitiers (the king's mistress) dominated the care of the royal children, despite attempts made by Catherine de Medici to assert her authority. Yet when it came to her own daughter's pregnancies, Catherine was able to supervise her medical treatments from afar and circumvent the advice of Spanish court physicians. Her earlier inexperience as a young mother (as well as a foreigner) played against her as a wife, but later as a widow she gained credibility and legitimacy as a medical advisor to her own passive daughter. What Broomhall argues was that gender itself was not a straightforward category by which women were judged for their medical skills and authority. She hopes to prove that women were allowed a variety of medical roles by male commentators and professional university trained physicians, and that these men's judgments about appropriate practices (whether negative or positive) were not always based on gender. Yet the majority of her examples rest on the assumption that the female practitioners in question were legitimate because of their physical nature as women. Queens, midwives, nurses and nuns were judged appropriate caregivers in specific feminized spheres. The role of mother is referred to throughout the book as justification for reproductive and paediatric medical knowledge. The cases that prove the contrary, such as a master barber who passed his profession to his wife and the villagers who supported a female healer, are ones that sparked controversy and court cases. It is unclear to Broomhall if widows of master barbers and apothecaries really intended to take on their husband's profession, or simply protect it for their sons. Successful female healers stressed the charitable (and thus feminine) impulses behind their work and got support primarily from rural people, who were not within the reach of the medical profession. Their detractors were university physicians who targeted these healers not just because they were untrained in their eyes, but specifically because they were women and thus excluded from joining their ranks. Male physicians did not succeed in the Renaissance or even throughout the early modern period in eradicating female (or male) healers, but neither did they respect or authenticate their medical knowledge as they did that of nuns, governesses, midwives and wet-nurses who operated within feminine medical categories. Ultimately, it is to this aspect of female medical authority that Broomhall contributes the most interesting insights and original research.