Women make up eight out of every ten healthcare workers in the United States. Yet they lag behind men when it comes to working in the roles of medical doctors and surgeons.
Why has healthcare become a professional field dominated by women and yet women represent a minority of physicians and doctors who serve at the top of the healthcare field?
Susan H. Brandt, a historian and lecturer at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, seeks to find an answer to these questions. In doing so, she takes us into the rich history of women healers with details from her book, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia.
About the Show
Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.
It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.
Each episode features a conversation with a historian who helps us shed light on important people and events in early American history.
Ben Franklin’s World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.
Episode Summary
Susan H. Brandt is a historian and former nurse practitioner. She’s a Lecturer at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her research focuses on women and gender and the history of medicine and health in early America, and she’s the author of Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia.
During our investigation of women healers, Susan reveals information about the roles women performed as healers during the early modern period; How women created and passed down medical knowledge from one culture and one generation to the next; And, why and how women’s roles as healers and medical practitioners became obscured and erased form our collective historical memory.
What You’ll Discover
- The kinds of medical practices women healers performed
- Women in Quaker communities
- Guilerma Penn
- The Lady Bountiful
- 17th and 18th-century recipe books kept by women healers
- How women learned healing skills
- Cross-cultural exchange between European, Indigenous, and Black healers
- Elizabeth Coates Paschall
- Hannah Freeman
- Black women healers during the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793
- Sarah Bass
- Republican Motherhood
- The cult of domesticity
- Women’s continued participation in the medical field
- The legacy of early American women healers
Links to People, Places, and Publications
Sponsor Links
Complementary Episodes
- Episode 003: Richard S. Newman, Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia
- Episode 005: Jeanne Abrams, Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health
- Episode 116: Erica Charters, Disease & the Seven Years’ War
- Episode 174: Thomas Apel, Yellow Fever in the Early American Republic
- Episode 263: Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination
- Episode 273: Victoria Johnson, David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic
- Episode 276: Stephen Fried, Benjamin Rush: Founding Father
- Episode 301: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 1
- Episode 302: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 2
Time Warp Question
In your opinion, what if wealthy women hadn’t taken on the role of healers or “Lady Bountifuls” in their communities during the late 17th and early 18th centuries? How do you think early American communities would’ve fared?
Questions, Comments, Suggestions
Do you have a question, comment, or suggestion?
Get in Touch! Send me an e-mail or leave a comment.
Listen!
Enjoy the Podcast?
Why Not Listen regularly through one of these apps?
| 
| 
Ratings & Reviews
If you enjoy this podcast, please give it a rating and review.
Positive ratings and reviews help bring Ben Franklin’s World to the attention of other history lovers who may not be aware of our show
Click here to rate & review on iTunes | Click here to rate & review on Stitcher