Women Healers

In Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia, Susan Brandt expertly recovers the stories of Philadelphian women healers from their roots in England to the opening of the Female Medical College of Philadelphia in 1850. These women operated broadly through both paid and unpaid healing work for their communities in capacities that ranged from nursing to compounding pharmaceuticals. Through manuscripts left by these women, along with advertisements and secondhand accounts of their practices, Brandt seeks to recover a history that had been obscured by 19^th century discourses of domesticity and the stereotype of “old wife” healers. The new image that Brandt develops shows a different kind of healer, framed as “Lady Bountiful”—a character from the 18^th century comedy The Beaux-Stratagem who was an elite benevolent woman renowned for her healing expertise. These women healers, following the “Lady Bountiful” model, could adapt to the changing forms of medical authority and market forces in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The book is chronologically organized into eight chapters that each illustrate one dimension of their healing practices, such as their kinship networks in chapter 2, their engagement with scientific authority in chapter 4, and their public reform efforts in chapter 8. For scholars of religion, this book will be especially interesting because of how the histories of these women healers are interwoven with the history of American religion. This review will highlight portions of this work and its involvement with religion, which was clearest in its discussion of Quaker women.

In the first chapter, Brandt focuses on Gulielma Maria Springett, a prominent English Quaker woman who later married William Penn. Brandt details how Quaker notions of spiritual equality enabled women to have greater participation in public life, which allowed them to engage in public healing practices (12). While Springett never went to Philadelphia, as she needed to care for her mother’s health, her son William Penn Jr. took a copy of her medicinal recipe book with him to the city to protect the health of his own family (15-17).

Brandt’s deep engagement with these recipe books is particularly strong. These books proved to be invaluable sources, as they often detailed the source of the recipe and recorded successful treatments. Through manuscripts left behind by Springett or later healers like Elizabeth Paschall, Brandt demonstrates how medical information was circulated through diffuse communication networks containing both men and women (47). One of Brandt’s many useful observations about this genre is that their middle and upper-class white female authors often obscured the contributions made by Native or African Americans. In a poignant example, Paschall’s recipe book describes several interactions with Native Americans, but she never records their names, as she does for white Americans. Brandt compensates for Paschall’s discrepancies through recovering the life of Hannah Freeman and the role of indigenous medical knowledge in chapter 3. While some Protestant ministers like David Brainerd claimed that Native American medical knowledge challenged Christianity, naturalists and healers, including the Philadelphian women Brandt explores, continued to exploit indigenous expertise (86).

Illuminating the influence of religion on medical practice, chapter 5 details how Quaker entrepreneurs navigated the practice of healing during the tumultuous American Revolution. Brandt recounts how the divisions among Quakers over pacifism led to changing practices for women healers like Margaret Hill Morris during the American Revolution. Pacifist Quakers like Morris would heal soldiers on both sides of the conflict; they also augmented their business practices to not inadvertently support the war, for instance by refusing Congress’ Bills of Credit as payment (129-131). Unfortunately, these acts led patriotic Americans to suspect Quakers of treason. With the economic difficulties brought on by the war, coupled with pressures that existed prior to the conflict, some itinerant Quaker women founded their own apothecary shops to supplement their ministerial income by selling medicines (120). In this unregulated market system, the public perception of medical authority became a marketable good, and women competed with one another to stay afloat.

One particularly captivating part of Women Healers is chapter 7, which focuses on the confluence between spiritual and physical healing during the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic. This chapter details the efforts of free African nurses, who were members of the Free African Society (FAS), and their public image as part of humanitarian efforts to alleviate the suffering of the epidemic. One such FAS member was Sarah Bass Allen, the wife of Richard Allen, who was the “founding mother” of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church (169). While her life before marrying Richard Allen is obscure, she was from Virginia, where spiritual and physical healing often intermingled among enslaved communities (171). This connection is continued through the combined efforts of FAS nurses and the AME Church to rehabilitate the image of African American nurses. This public healing effort to treat victims of the epidemic, Brandt argues, was a political act that enabled African Americans to argue for abolitionism by employing similar rhetoric to that of the emerging evangelical benevolent movements (180-186).

While Women Healers is primarily a history of medicine that only discusses religion insofar as it relates to contextualizing Brandt’s sources, scholars of religion will find value in Brandt’s work because of her use of Christian history to outline relationships of care. This book is a great addition to the growing body of scholarship on the history of medicine that acknowledges the influence of religious beliefs upon medical practice. The monograph is written in a clear and accessible way, so even readers unfamiliar with medical history will be able to quickly grasp Brandt’s arguments. While there has been a push to focus on the role of women physicians following their entry into the profession in 1849, as Brandt concludes, the history of official women physicians should not obscure the longer history of women’s roles as important lay healers in their communities in earlier eras (219). This history of lay healing goes hand in hand with the history of early America and is deeply interwoven into both lived religion and the foundations of American religious institutions.

David Reed Hall is a master’s student in American Religious History at Florida State University.

David Hall

Date Of Review:

July 20, 2024