ABSTRACT
The vast majority of female mountebanks were born or married into the business. The gendered division of medical duties between man and wife seen in, for example, the Erlau Easter play, is not an exceptional quirk, but early evidence for a long-standing tradition of quack troupes as small family concerns, specifically targeting the needs of female as well as male consumers and patients. Quacks were well aware that it was profitable to provide, in parallel to their often very public marketplace practice, a more discrete marketing service, and private consultation facility, for female patients reluctant to divulge their medical problems in public or to a male. Numerous documents refer to male healers who shared their medical practice with a woman competent to provide such a service, generally their wife. Their successful targeting of female clients earned them criticism that the quacksalver’s ‘especiall practise […] is vpon women; labours to make their mindes sicke, ere their bodies feele it, and then there’s worke for the Dog-leach’.1
