FIRESIDE CHAT: Follow the Science: Women Healers, the Library Company, and the Pursuit of Medical Knowledge in Early Philadelphia

February 16th, 2023 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

This talk by Dr. Susan Brandt features learnings from her book Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia, specifically tailored to a Library Company audience. In this talk, Dr. Brandt flips the traditional narrative to examine the history of science from the “bottom up.” This approach reveals the lines between science and folk healing are blurrier, and the story includes numerous women of various ethnicities and social orders. Women were on the frontlines of grassroots medical and scientific knowledge production in early Philadelphia. Brandt’s talk also underscores the centrality of the Library Company of Philadelphia as both a book repository and as philosophical society: a site of medical and scientific knowledge exchange that was accessible to women.

Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries. Spanning a century and a half and drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

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