Medical Contexts for Early Modern Women’s Writing

The medical contexts for early modern women’s writing in English include medical theory, the experience of illness, and the practice of medicine. Humoralism provided a dominant medical model but was not without its challengers, those from Paracelsus and Van Helmont among them. Ideas about illness, including psychological illness, and sexual and racial difference were informed by thinking about the body’s humors. Women’s medicalized experiences included being a patient and facing illnesses, such as the plague and childbirth, as well as experiencing what we now call disability. The practice of medicine included women who worked in professional contexts as midwives and surgeons and in domestic environments.