In her mid-eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall was a widowed Philadelphia Quaker merchant who ran a dry goods business. She was also well known in her community as a skilled healer. Friends, kin, neighbors, and strangers sought her health care advice. Although women’s healing work can be difficult for historians to recover, Paschall’s detailed medical recipe book reveals her participation in medical and scientific networks that imbued her remedies with multiple layers of authority. She recorded remedies from Indigenous, white, and Black lay healers as well as from physicians and naturalists. Paschall also checked out medical and scientific books from the Library Company of Philadelphia that informed the chemical, physiological, and anatomical bases for her medical treatments. Through her self-directed studies, documented observations, and medical experiments, Paschall embraced the emerging authority of science. In this presentation based on my book, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia, I argue that women were not only essential health care providers, they were also on the frontlines of grassroots medical and scientific knowledge production.
Susan Brandt is a lecturer in the history department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She received her undergraduate degree from Duke University and her PhD in History from Temple University. Brandt completed a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Brandt’s dissertation on women healers was awarded the 2016 Lerner-Scott Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. Women's History by the Organization of American Historians. She has published an article in Early American Studies and a chapter in Barbara Oberg, ed., Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World. She revised a chapter on early Pennsylvania in the forthcoming second edition of Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth. Brandt’s book, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (Penn Press, 2022) received Honorable Mention for the First Book Award, granted by the Library Company of Philadelphia. Prior to pursuing a career in history, Brandt worked as a nurse practitioner.
This event is co-sponsored by the Health, Medicine, and Society Program.