Theme summary: Medicine

Despite many pervasive myths to the contrary, it was entirely conventional for women of the 17th century, like Susanna, to take an active role in domestic medicine, treating their families for ailments and even sharing advice with others. Some women practiced medical care more widely. In Susanna Hall’s case, as the wife of a successful physician, she is likely to have taken an active role in the preparation and administration of treatments to the local community and perhaps even her husband’s patients from further afield. Follow this theme to explore medical care and specifically how women treated or were treated for a range of conditions.

Return to the digital spatial archive.

In the Collection

A curated search on medicine-related items in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archive and Collections can be viewed on the online catalogue.

Further Research

Follow the links below to a selection of other archives and libraries with holdings relating to early modern medicine:

1. The University of Cambridge holds the casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier (mid-16th century – early 17th century).
2. The Northamptonshire Central Library holds the journal, medical papers and letters of Lady Grace Mildmay (c.1552-1620). Lady Mildmay was well-known for her skill as a medical practitioner.
3. The Barts Health Archive holds records relating to staff, patients, buildings and management of the hospitals in the current Barts Health group, as well as numerous other hospitals, institutions, charities, organisations and individuals relating to health care and training in the City and East London. The records date back to the 12th century.
4. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind cares for the archives of Bethlem Royal Hospital, the Maudsley Hospital and Warlingham Park Hospital.
5. County Records Offices often hold records relating to parish poor relief within the county including the provision of welfare to the sick and destitute.

Free online resources

1. This blog by Chris Booth looks at Stratford-upon-Avon apothecary, Philip Rogers, in the late-16th and early 17th centuries: Stratford’s Apothecary in the Time of Shakespeare by Chris Booth
2. The Royal College of Physicians manuscript archive contains a range of fully digitised manuscript receipt books dating from the mid-15th to the early-19th-century (https://archive.org/details/rcplondonmanuscripts)
3. The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. The MHL’s growing collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries, all of which are available through the Internet Archive. (https://archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary)
4. The Centre of the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick is a useful resource for research on women and medicine, particularly the work of Dr Elaine Leong on household medicine and receipt books (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/research_refresh/previous_research_refresh/)
5. The Manuscript Cookbook Survey provides information on extant manuscript receipt books held in US public collections (https://www.manuscriptcookbookssurvey.org/about-the-project/) (Twitter: @MCScookbooks)