Women Healers and the Medical Marketplace of 16th-Century Lyon
Alison Klairmont-Lingo
Dynamis: Vol.19 (1999)
Abstract
Although women’s legal and marital status make them almost invisible in archival documents, what traces remain suggest that women participated in Lyon’s medical marketplace in various ways and under various guises. At Lyon’s municipally-funded poor hospital, the Hotel-Dieu, widows and wives of surgeons, repentant prostitutes, birth attendants, and .women» cared for the destitute and sick of Lyon, in the capacity of midwives, physicians, surgeons, and barbers. Though the records almost always identify women practitioners simply as «women» or by their first and last name, many of them engaged in the identical tasks as male practitioners. Outside of the hospital, wives acted as barbers or surgeons alongside or in place of their husbands when widowed. In the final analysis, municipal authorities accepted the help of female healers on the basis of their traditional medical knowledge, joint work identity with their practitioner-husbands, and proven skill.
The marketplace in Lyon was filled with the scent of imported spices and the hawking of itinerant book sellers. As money exchanged hands, artisans, scholars, and merchants from al1 over Europe exchanged thoughts and fought about the new religious ideas of Luther and Calvin and the significance of the recovery of ancient medical, philosophical, and biblical texts now ^being edited and retranslated from original Greek sources (1).
Advertisement
This commingling of minds and money surfaced in a powerful way in the printing and publishing industry brought to Lyon from Germany and the Low Countries in the late fifteenth century. Printing attracted a bevy of scholars, translators, correctors, and merchants. At Lyon’s four annual fairs, book dealers and scholars engaged and competed with one another for intellectual and economic preeminence in one of the most open markets of the time (2).
Alison Klairmont-Lingo
Dynamis: Vol.19 (1999)
Abstract
Although women’s legal and marital status make them almost invisible in archival documents, what traces remain suggest that women participated in Lyon’s medical marketplace in various ways and under various guises. At Lyon’s municipally-funded poor hospital, the Hotel-Dieu, widows and wives of surgeons, repentant prostitutes, birth attendants, and .women» cared for the destitute and sick of Lyon, in the capacity of midwives, physicians, surgeons, and barbers. Though the records almost always identify women practitioners simply as «women» or by their first and last name, many of them engaged in the identical tasks as male practitioners. Outside of the hospital, wives acted as barbers or surgeons alongside or in place of their husbands when widowed. In the final analysis, municipal authorities accepted the help of female healers on the basis of their traditional medical knowledge, joint work identity with their practitioner-husbands, and proven skill.
The marketplace in Lyon was filled with the scent of imported spices and the hawking of itinerant book sellers. As money exchanged hands, artisans, scholars, and merchants from al1 over Europe exchanged thoughts and fought about the new religious ideas of Luther and Calvin and the significance of the recovery of ancient medical, philosophical, and biblical texts now ^being edited and retranslated from original Greek sources (1).
This commingling of minds and money surfaced in a powerful way in the printing and publishing industry brought to Lyon from Germany and the Low Countries in the late fifteenth century. Printing attracted a bevy of scholars, translators, correctors, and merchants. At Lyon’s four annual fairs, book dealers and scholars engaged and competed with one another for intellectual and economic preeminence in one of the most open markets of the time (2).
Click here to read this article from Dynamis
Related Posts
Subscribe to Medievalverse