ABSTRACT
This chapter touches on the grey area of overlap, so criticized by qualified physicians, between women’s domestic and charitable healthcare work and their professional quack activities. It also examines three of the four main options open to women in the mainstream of quack activity. These were to seek employment with an established quack, work independently, or oversee their own healthcare empire, of whatever size, whether sedentary or itinerant. Many, as discussed in Chapter 11, pursued a fourth option, by being born into or marrying into the business, and contributing to a family-based healing concern, often run in partnership with their husband. The medical practice of early modern women was wide-ranging. Female healers could limit their operations to the margins of the healthcare industry, as generally defined. Like some women at Hamburg trade fairs of the 1730s, they could be licensed to set up a ‘small medicine table’, or sell one specific product such as dental powder or anthelmintic herbs, as Susanna Kämpfen, wife of Carl Christian Kemp variously was, or trusses, as was Maria Dorothea Jacobin.1 Or they could perform simple medical chores such as curing warts and binding and cleaning wounds, or tell fortunes and provide amulets. Certain medical specializations requiring no formal training, such as dental care or eye surgery, remained professional options to both genders throughout the seventeenth century in some regions. Many official documents concerned with specific troupes of itinerant healers name only the leader, and give minimal, if any, details concerning the number and make-up of any accompanying family or troupe members. Because many female healthcare practitioners were unlicensed, whole areas of female healing were only officially documented in exceptional circumstances.2 This makes cultural documentation especially significant, but literary references to itinerant women are often brief and non-specific, and visual depictions do not always clarify the role of any depicted women. This lack of detailed documentation reflects the marginalization of women, their subordinate legal, economic, educational and marital status, the general distrust of their performing skills, and profound lack of respect for their medical abilities. It contributes to the challenge of identifying and classifying female quacks.
