Women and healthcare in early modern German towns

Abstract

This article is a study of women's continued involvement in healthcare practice in German Imperial towns and cities between the fifteenth century and the mid eighteenth century. It contextualizes the defamatory rhetoric against women healers found in printed books and publications, corrects the distortions of juridical administrative sources, and modifies the frequent complaints of medical corporations. Comparing the sources produced by hospital administrators and by other administrative agencies with the practice notes of a physician allows us to see women's day‐to‐day medical tasks in institutions and households, their shared competencies and networks, as well as their role in facilitating the flow of medical information. Moreover, female practitioners belonging to different social and cultural strata, who fulfilled varying levels of medical tasks, become visible by analysing institutional sources in conjunction with more private records documenting the intersection of domestic healthcare with treatment offered by certified practitioners. Contrary to what administrative and hospital records suggest, the handwritten daily notes of the Nuremberg physician Johann Christoph Götz do not indicate a devaluation of female medical expertise in the early modern period; on the contrary, the information of learned women from mercantile or academic families became part of the process by which medical knowledge was created.