Female Barrenness, Bodily Access and Aromatic Treatments in Seventeenth-Century England

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.Scholars examining medical practice in early modern England have often remarked upon the complexities of the relationship between male physicians and female patients. It has been noted that ideas of female modesty and concern about the potential erotic nature of contact between patients and practitioners could affect the treatment of certain disorders. This paper contributes to this on-going discussion by examining the use of pungent substances to diagnose and treat female barrenness. Diagnostic tests included in medical treatises could rely upon the woman’s ability to perceive a particular substance. These tests thus put women at the centre of the diagnosis of their disorders and allowed them to negotiate access to their reproductive bodies. Similarly medical practitioners included a range of treatments for infertility that involved the fumes of certain substances entering the womb or surrounding the body. These treatments may have allowed women, and perhaps their medical practitioners, to choose a method of remedy that did not involve the application of external lotions to the genitalia. Thus by considering the multi-sensory nature of medical treatment this paper will highlight that the diversity of remedies advocated in early modern medical texts would perhaps have allowed women to restrict access to their reproductive bodies, while still obtaining diagnosis and treatment.Peer reviewe

Remedies for Headaches in A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1608)

Seventeenth-century English closets were books containing a wide repertoire of household supplies targeted at female readers. Such volumes typically included medical recipes, as early modern women also used to be responsible for preserving and restoring the health of relatives and close neighbors. A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (Sir Hugh Platt, 1608), in particular, incorporates 13 medicinal remedies devised for the therapeutic management of 3 different types of headaches: head-ache, migraine and pain in the head. This article historically contextualizes the text, offers a valid classification of headaches in 17th-century England, and describes the composition of the homemade pharmaceutical forms recommended to female care-givers, the guidelines for administration and its potential pain-relieving effects.63663250,8442,524Q3Q2SCI