In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries. Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphia’s Female Medical College, the first women’s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women’s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women’s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women’s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures. Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.
In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries. Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphia’s Female Medical College, the first women’s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women’s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women’s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women’s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures. Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.
This full-color reference offers practical, evidence-based guidance on using more than 120 medicinal plants, including how to formulate herbal remedies to treat common disease conditions. A body-systems based review explores herbal medicine in context, offering information on toxicology, drug interactions, quality control, and other key topics. More than 120 herbal monographs provide quick access to information on the historical use of the herb in humans and animals, supporting studies, and dosing information. Includes special dosing, pharmacokinetics, and regulatory considerations when using herbs for horses and farm animals. Expanded pharmacology and toxicology chapters provide thorough information on the chemical basis of herbal medicine. Explores the evolutionary relationship between plants and mammals, which is the basis for understanding the unique physiologic effects of herbs. Includes a body systems review of herbal remedies for common disease conditions in both large and small animals. Discusses special considerations for the scientific research of herbs, including complex and individualized interventions that may require special design and nontraditional outcome goals.
Precedents are decisions judges have issued in prior cases. In the common law, precedents are used to determine what the outcome of present cases should be, under the doctrine of "stare decisis, "which stipulates that new cases are resolved by applying legal rules developed in the process of deciding past cases. This volume postulates a relationship between the concept of legal precedent and the means that are used to make specific precedents available to the legal profession. The author concentrates specifically on the effect computer databases such as lexis and westlaw will have on the use of precedent in the common law. By tracing the history of law reporting, Professor Brenner demonstrates how the Anglo-American conception of precedent has altered over the past seven hundred years, and that these alterations reflect changes in the means used to distribute precedents. She explains why computers will become the primary means of disseminating precedents and describes the evolution and operation of the two on-line services that provide access to precedents by means of computer terminals and modems. These services--lexis and westlaw-- are operated by private entrepreneurs in the business of providing precedents to the legal profession. Arguing that such services will have a profound effect on the conception and use of precedent, Brenner provides an empirical study of both services to show the effects they have already had, and outlines the conception of precedent that will result from the use of computers as "law reporters." This, she believes, will be a quantitative conception in which judicial decisions will be used in a manner analogous to the use of quantitative data in scientific endeavors. This study, written with a brilliance often reserved for popular writing at its best, is unique in its application of sociology of knowledge principles to the analysis of law reporting in its examination of citations to approximately 25,000 judicial decisions. It will be of special interest to lawyers, sociologists, and policymakers.
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