Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment, by Wendy D. Churchill

Abstract

In this book, the author, Wendy Churchill, asks three questions. Firstly, did early modern medical practitioners treat men and women suffering from the same ailments differently? Secondly, was there a notion of female-specific diseases? Thirdly, if such a construct existed, how did practitioners respond to these conditions and treat the female patient? The patient–practitioner relationship is the focus of Dr Churchill’s story, and, with an impressive array of doctors’ casebooks, patient-practitioner correspondence, consultation letters and medical treatises as source material, her analysis is certainly systematic. Women, Churchill concludes, of various ages and differing marital status, socio-economic and racial backgrounds, were engaged participants in the medical landscape of England in the period from 1590 to 1740. Crucially, Churchill argues, in contrast with previous scholarship, that women did not necessarily receive rough, negligent or excessive treatment as a result of their sex. The book is divided into four chapters, respectively dealing with the consultative relationship between male medical practitioners and female patients; treatment of female-specific illnesses; treating the sexed body; and, finally, the medical diagnosis of women’s minds, bodies and emotions. The author convincingly demonstrates that medical practitioners identified women as physiologically distinct from men. She provides numerous examples from casebooks of differential treatment and diagnosis for men and women. Dr Gideon Harvey (1636/7–1702), for example, identified the lack of regard for ‘Constitution, Age, [and] Sex’ shown by medical mountebanks in London, as one reason patients should be increasingly cautious in selecting their practitioner.