Families, medical secrets and public health in early modern Venice

Abstract

This article highlights women's contribution to public health in early modern Venice using the case study of Marieta Colochi and her family's medical secret. This medical cure operated as a dowry, an important object within female inheritance and was also sold to the Venetian Republic for a significant sum of money because of its apparent success in treating the plague. The city's Health Office employed family members to administer the treatment, including Marieta. Surviving texts describe her as a salaried doctor and the Health Office archive records the use of her medical services in Venice and across the territorial state. Marieta's attempt at election as an independent Health Office doctor failed but she continued to be employed alongside male members of her family. Her history suggests that the nature of record‐keeping for early modern public health, with its emphasis on office‐holding, may have obscured the contributions made by women. The family unit emerges as significant in a private and public sense: the Health Office authorities dealt with individual, skilled medical women by employing them within family relationships and provided opportunities for female employment in healthcare within institutions that were modelled on the family in a symbolic way. Viewing women's work through the lens of the family allows historians to acknowledge the gender hierarchies of early modern society whilst illuminating the valuable contributions which could be made by women to the healthcare of this period.