Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Susan E. Klepp, Temple University

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich identified eight "discrete duties" that shaped women's lives in the early colonial period—housewife, deputy husband, consort, mother, mistress, neighbor, Christian, and heroine—in her now-classic study, Good Wives.1 Rebecca J. Tannenbaum has written a modest addendum to Good Wives on a ninth role, that of healer. (Ulrich subsumed that calling under housewifery and motherhood.) All nine roles transcended domestic boundaries by establishing social networks serving important community functions, and all balanced women's exercise of authority with social expectations of meekness. Like Good Wives, The Healer's Calling focuses on New England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and only briefly sketches changes in gender roles that emerged later. There are a few differences in approach. Christian models, language, and symbolism infused Ulrich's account, whereas Tannenbaum's is a secular reading of women healers. Unlike Ulrich, Tannenbaum exhibits an interest in the social foundations of witchcraft accusations resonant with the work of Carol Karlsen. Ulrich sought to define discrete feminine roles; Tannenbaum stresses the gendered distinctions as well as the large overlap in women's and men's medical roles, practices, and explanatory models. In this regard, The Healer's Calling serves as a prologue to Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale.2	1
Tannenbaum begins with a concise and elegant summary of seventeenth-century medical theory. In the highest order of healers were those very few men who were not simply literate, but who were educated in Latin, in shorthand, and in alchemical symbols and measurements. This level of the healer's art—a world of secrets—was closed to other healers, but there was wide scope for the mostly female nonprofessional practitioners whose knowledge derived from experience. Housewives distilled medicines according to traditional recipes or following a doctor's advice; they attended the sick (particularly other women) and observed symptoms, prepared sickbed diets, cleaned, bandaged, and medicated. Adolescent girls were often assigned the grueling task of all-night attendance. Sitting and watching provided girls with an apprenticeship in an important adult skill.	2
Household medicine was also community medicine. Women exchanged medical recipes and ingredients, shared attendance at bedsides, and, all the while, gossiped and gossiped, praising some in the community and coming to fear or hate others—there was no romantic golden age of uniformly supportive, sisterly female gatherings. Evidence of illegitimacy, adultery, prevarication, malevolence, or abuse could be found, and it was expected that attendees would report their findings to legal authorities. These women were responsible to both the patient and the community. Women could be sole practitioners as well. A handful of women, particularly the literate wives of wealthy men, aided their husbands' reputations through their charitable medical activities, others gained local reputations and employment as doctoresses, and still others acquired notoriety as suspected witches. Women's authority in medical and birthing settings was, Tannenbaum finds, always mediated through men. It was men who called women together, who linked women with doctors, and who tried the cases of bastardy, false swearing, witchcraft, and abuse that women sometimes uncovered.	. . .