{"title":"Women at the centre: medical entrepreneurialism and ‘la grande médecine’ in eighteenth-century Lyon","authors":"Cathy McClive, Lisa W Smith","doi":"10.1093/fh/crad067","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n We draw on Colin Jones’ framing of the Sisters of Charity as medical practitioners rather than charitable carers (1989) to centre the entrepreneurialism of Marie Grand and Marie Fiansons’ medical practice in eighteenth-century Lyon. Although historians recognize the significance of early modern European women’s (medical) work, they often assume such work existed in the shadows of the medical marketplace. Archival erasures and gendered narratives obscure the flexibility of women’s medical practices. Grand and Fiansons’ documents, analysed alongside adverts for local medical services, elucidate working women’s medical practices. As silk-workers and self-defined ‘chymists’ and herbalists, Grand and Fiansons were at the centre of healthcare and medicine. The breadth of their practice and networks emerges through the exceptional survival of their ‘counter-archive’ in the consular court archives. Their story reveals the fluidity and porousness of boundaries between domestic and occupational medicine, precarity and commodified care work, and charity and entrepreneurialism.","PeriodicalId":43617,"journal":{"name":"French History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"French History","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crad067","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
We draw on Colin Jones’ framing of the Sisters of Charity as medical practitioners rather than charitable carers (1989) to centre the entrepreneurialism of Marie Grand and Marie Fiansons’ medical practice in eighteenth-century Lyon. Although historians recognize the significance of early modern European women’s (medical) work, they often assume such work existed in the shadows of the medical marketplace. Archival erasures and gendered narratives obscure the flexibility of women’s medical practices. Grand and Fiansons’ documents, analysed alongside adverts for local medical services, elucidate working women’s medical practices. As silk-workers and self-defined ‘chymists’ and herbalists, Grand and Fiansons were at the centre of healthcare and medicine. The breadth of their practice and networks emerges through the exceptional survival of their ‘counter-archive’ in the consular court archives. Their story reveals the fluidity and porousness of boundaries between domestic and occupational medicine, precarity and commodified care work, and charity and entrepreneurialism.
期刊介绍:
French History offers an important international forum for everyone interested in the latest research in the subject. It provides a broad perspective on contemporary debates from an international range of scholars, and covers the entire chronological range of French history from the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century. French History includes articles covering a wide range of enquiry across the arts and social sciences, as well as across historical periods, and a book reviews section that is essential reference for any serious student of French history.