Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia by Susan H. Brandt (review)

Reviewed by: Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia by Susan H. Brandt Leah Astbury Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia. By Susan H. Brandt. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 307 pages. Cloth, ebook. Susan H. Brandt's Women Healers brings to light an eclectic bunch of characters. The roughly chronological account of Philadelphia's medical marketplace from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the 1870s features close readings of more than fifteen female practitioners and their activities, relationships, and experiences. Key figures include Elizabeth Coates Paschall (1702–68), a widowed Quaker merchant, who kept a recipe book containing 167 pages of medical recipes; Hannah Freeman, a Lenape healer known as "Indian Hannah" (1731–1802) who offered medical care and herbs to Quaker people in Chester County; Mary Watters, an Irish immigrant army nurse who advertised her tinctures and medicines in Philadelphia newspapers from the 1770s to the 1790s; Sarah Bass Allen (1764–1849), a Free African Society nurse who cared for sick Philadelphians during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793; and Elizabeth Marshall, who took over the family apothecary business in the early nineteenth century. Brandt offers dazzling detail about the scientific and medical networks that women joined in early Philadelphia, and her book will be an asset to any historian of the Delaware region as well as early America more broadly. Women Healers makes particular use of family archives, most notably recipe books and letters, to suggest that women played a pivotal role in domestic and commercial healing activities in Philadelphia. It starts with William Penn Jr. arriving in the burgeoning town in 1704 from England armed with a book marked with "My Mother's Recaipts receipts or recipes for Cookerys Presarving and Cyrurgery Surgery" (15) and ends with the founding of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850. In many ways, the book's findings support the growing consensus of historians of medieval and early modern medicine that professional and nonprofessional medical knowledge and practice were fluid across the period.1 These methodological and theoretical developments have shown that women practiced medicine in a variety of spaces that were not always wholly domestic, insights supported by Brandt's End Page 435 account. Women Healers is far less concerned, however, with the flip side of this finding: that men also engaged in domestic medical and scientific experimentation.2 The fact that many healing businesses were at their heart family ones challenges scholarly attempts to draw a boundary between commercial and domestic medicine and between male and female medical knowledge and practice.3 Instead, Brandt seems to suggest that what men and women knew about medicine and healing, as well as the treatments they offered, were often different and in opposition to one another. She begins her account with the figure of Lady Bountiful—a character in George Farquhar's play The Beaux Stratagem that appeared in Philadelphia in 1749—a kindly "Country Gentlewoman" who offers cures to all her neighbors and family. Brandt suggests that real women healers served as models for the character, who helps set up a key theme in the book: that seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Philadelphians were more comfortable recognizing women's medical expertise when it was offered on a charitable basis rather than for pay.4 Chapter 1 focuses on the networks of medical knowledge in the Quaker community in the seventeenth century and reveals that women participated in "extensive webs of healing information exchanges that expanded their skills, created new knowledge, and conferred medical authority" (25). Brandt particularly argues that recipe books provide the foundational legacies for women's medical work in early America. The second chapter examines a Lady Bountiful figure, Elizabeth Coates Paschall, a Philadelphia Quaker who practiced healing for kin and neighbors and whose life supports Brandt's argument about the importance of domestic spaces as the first port of call in moments of ill health. Chapter 3 shows the centrality of healing traditions to Lenape Indigenous women and their communities, as well as the ways in which Anglo-Americans made use of this expertise with regard to both healing practices and materia medica. In...