Trye, Mary

Mary Trye, daughter of chemical physician Thomas O’Dowde, was a practicing physician in Pall Mall, London. Trye and her father were not university-trained medical practitioners, but used medicines and experimental philosophy to treat the poor. Trye published a treatise, Medicatrix, or, the Woman-Physician (1675), after her father died treating patients during the plague of 1665. Her treatise is a vindication of her father against the accusations of Henry Stubbe, a physician at Warwick, who attacked O’Dowde alongside other practitioners of non-Galenic, chemical medicine. Trye’s Medicatrix offers what her title page calls a “medical challenge to Mr. Stubbe”—it scrutinizes his publications, his approach to medicine using phlebotomy, and provides a “revival of Mr. O’Dowde’s medicine and other chymical remedies.” Trye’s treatise is an example of a woman writing about medical practices while practicing medicine in community settings.