As part of Women’s History Month, we spoke with Sharon T. Strocchia about her new book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, which uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.
Your research demonstrates that women in Renaissance Italy played a major role in providing health care. Why have historians failed to recognize their centrality until so recently?
I would highlight two reasons why Renaissance women healers have been hiding in plain sight for so long. First, the historiography of Italian Renaissance medicine has been dominated by developments in academic medicine—anatomy, dissection, humanistic debates. Although this body of scholarship has been invaluable for understanding transformations in medical thinking, it has been less concerned with the lived experience of illness on the streets or the activities of frontline healers in households and hospitals. As a result, studies of women’s entanglements with household medicine, care practices, and the culture of experimentation on the Italian peninsula have not flourished to the same degree as elsewhere. Second, many of the care practices performed by Renaissance women have either been naturalized as “women’s work” or coded as charitable activities. The first interpretation makes women’s labor and know-how less visible, while the second often empties it of medical meaning. In addition, a persistent focus on practitioners’ official titles and occupational identities, along with the greater value assigned to cure over care, have led scholars to both undercount and undervalue the healthcare services women provided to household and community. In order to capture a more accurate, dynamic picture of medical provisioning in the early modern period, we need to redefine what “counts” as medical work.
What was one of the most surprising discoveries you made while conducting archival research for this book?
I was amazed by the extent to which sixteenth-century Italian urban women kept abreast of market trends and new technologies for making remedies and wellness products. Religious women living in convents, for instance, kept their finger on the pulse of commercial life, in part because selling medicinal remedies represented such a vital revenue stream for their communities. Thanks to their wide-ranging information networks, they could respond nimbly to shifts in the medical marketplace, such as the globalization of new medicaments and changing consumer preferences. They also stayed connected to the knowledge circulating in local health markets by exchanging treasured recipes with friends and family and by experimenting directly with various health-giving products.
You focus on the various spaces where women practiced medicine—the household, the pox hospital, and the convent. Can you give an example of how nun apothecaries worked “at the nexus of religion, magic, and medicine”? How did they understand their work to be both sacred and scientific?
Take the case of the Tuscan nun Orsola Fontebuoni, who was active in the 1620s. This recognized charismatic seamlessly melded her spiritual gifts with naturalistic healing skills. An accomplished pharmacist, Orsola was conversant with old standbys from medieval Mediterranean pharmacopeia as well as newer additions to the European medicine chest imported from the Americas. She helped expand the convent’s pharmacy business while also attracting powerful patrons, thanks to her visions and ecstasies. Even while she was experimenting with new remedies in her workshop, she trafficked in healing relics, circulating them within local female networks that included members of the Medici court. Among her most intimate clients was the Tuscan grand duchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, to whom she provided magico-religious remedies like amulets, informed medical advice gleaned from long years of experience, and priceless consolation in the form of healing eloquence. For Orsola, these healing activities comprised an integrated whole that simultaneously tapped the powers of the natural and sacred worlds.
Your book moves between the micro and the macro in terms of historical scope, zeroing in on the lives of individual women and health practitioners to analyze the broader systems of their time. Who do you find to be one of the most fascinating figures in the book, and what do you think readers would want to know about her?
One of the most intriguing figures I encountered was the Florentine nun Giovanna Ginori. She came from a renowned local family that had deep investments in civic politics and social welfare initiatives. Giovanna entered the convent around age twelve and took vows four years later in 1517. Many of her female relatives were known for their charitable work, such as founding shelters for at-risk girls. So there was a shared family interest in helping the helpless, which probably accounts for Giovanna’s placement in the convent pharmacy at an early age. She apprenticed there for six years with an older, skilled mentor, from whom she learned her craft—how to identify and process medicinal herbs, how to prepare efficacious remedies, how to experiment with new techniques and materials. In the thirty-seven years that she ran the convent pharmacy, Giovanna also read widely in the medical literature of her day and experimented with new medical remedies in her workshop. Often working around the clock as a back-up nurse in the convent infirmary, she became a renowned pharmacist and healer. At the same time, she had a keen business sense that led her to develop innovative products, expand the pharmacy’s client base, and build its reputation. We still have several signed sales receipts written in her own hand. Gifted with skilled hands and an inquiring mind, Giovanna Ginori is proof positive that women have enjoyed a long history in medicine, science, and technology.
We tend to focus on how far medicine has come since the 1500s, but what are some of the enduring effects or lessons of Renaissance medicine? How might we turn to the Renaissance to think about developing a culture of care and consolation?
I think there are a couple of things we can learn from these forgotten healers and their world. One is that the task of healing is complex. Renaissance medicine took a holistic view of health that wove together physical, mental, and spiritual or emotional elements. By contrast, modern biomedicine tends to divide the body into many constituent parts and to divorce human health from the broad ecosystems in which it is embedded. Renaissance notions of health and healing remind us that we’re deeply interconnected, both as individuals and as a species. I would also say that, while Renaissance medicine lacked the hallmarks associated with modern biomedicine, it was much richer in community-based resources. The importance of cultivating personal relationships with our healthcare providers as well as the crucial role played by support networks in sustaining health and well-being are lessons we’re learning over and over again.
