Motherly Medicine: Domestic Healers and Apothecaries

Abstract

‘Medicine began at home’, aptly wrote historian Keith Thomas,¹ and ‘Lay medical practice was centred on the family.’ Indeed, self-medication and healing were commonplace in the Early Modern period: ‘Patients often treated themselves, and the women members of the family especially were the sources of medical knowledge and treatment.’² One could add to these statements that medicine was practised by mothers and handed down through the ages by their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers.³ The influential and innovative sixteenth-century French agronomist Olivier de Serres, Seigneur du Pradel,⁴ believed that women were better suited for family or domestic medicine than men because they were naturally ‘officious and charitable’. ‘Mothers’, he wrote, ‘opened their hearts to understanding apothecary, healing minor cuts, wounds, and many other ailments.’ From books, ‘they take several salutory remedies which come to them easily. They also used many remedies they have learned from their experiences.’⁵ Likewise, Juan Vives, the Spanish humanist, instructed wives to look after their husbands when they were unwell. Wives should, ‘treat his wounds, cover his limbs to keep them from the cold’. Wives ‘should look after their husbands themselves, rather than employing their domestics’.⁶