ABSTRACT
No Jewish women appear to have studied medicine at universities in the Dutch Republic or beyond in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet women were certainly working in the health and care sectors. They assisted physicians, surgeons and apothecaries in the exercise of their professions, and looked after the sick and dying within their communities. It should be noted, however, that in the seventeenth century especially, Ashkenazi women (and men) were frequently called upon to care for sick Portuguese Jews, since the latter preferred not to soil their hands with such a task.
