Colonial Women as Practitioners of Herbal Medicine
Research and text by Elise Helmers
I. Female Healers of New Netherland
The roles of women in seventeenth-century New Netherland were incredibly diverse, taking place in both the domestic space and the public sphere. Included in their responsibilities was the work of community healing, which comprised the duties of midwife, bedside nurse, and apothecary. Their skills were garnered from oral traditions and, less commonly, printed books which attempted to record the oftentimes fragmented lore of folk medicine (Hatfield xvii). The geographic isolation of settlers in the North American colonies meant that the knowledge of female healers, particularly in regards to botanic, or plant-based, medicines, was vital to the survival of new settlements.
As the primary caretakers of homestead gardens, also known as kitchen gardens, colonial women were well aware of how to cultivate these plots with the ingredients for food and herbal medicines. According to Rebecca J. Tannenbaum in her article “Elizabeth Davenport’s Medical Practice in New Haven Colony” (1997), “cooking and the preparation of medicines were so closely related that one contemporary cookbook, published in England in 1653, included on the same page recipes for ‘a maid dish of hartechoakes’ and ‘an excellent medicine or salve for an ache’...” (270). In this way, the colonial kitchen garden functioned as a form of household grocery and apothecary shop.
The traditional kitchen garden contained plants and herbs acquired in the New World, as well as those brought over as seeds from the Old World (Gifford Jr. 268). The use of both North American and European herbs in botanic recipes points to the complicated coexistence of conflicting medical theories in the seventeenth century. One such theory advanced the idea that plants native to Europe were best for healing the ailments of Europeans, despite the settlers’ relocation to the Americas. In opposition to this notion was the theory originating with the sixteenth-century Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus and subsequently promoted in many seventeenth-century plant books, which suggested that nature provides remedies to cure diseases in the countries those ailments originate in (Gifford Jr. 268). These concepts highlight the inconsistent medical advice women of the colonies were made to contend with, and quickly adapt to, in their unfamiliar environments.
Despite their significant responsibilities as garden cultivators, colonial women were not solely assigned to the domestic space. This was especially true in New Netherland, where women's roles were arguably more varied than those in Anglo-American settlements. In the Old World, Dutch women routinely received an education in household and business management, meaning they were readily equipped with the skills to work in a range of occupations (Todt 52). Eventually, this desire for economic autonomy amongst the female population was brought to the Dutch colonies of North America. Given the seventeenth-century associations of women with medicinal practice, it is not surprising that the art of healing became a means through which they could assert their financial independence. In fact, by the early 1630s the Dutch West India Company was officially hiring midwives as company employees (Duffy 8). These midwives played significant and active roles in the new settlement, as the first hospital in New Amsterdam was not established until 1658, which in itself was small and inadequate for the colony’s growing demand of medical services (Duffy 10).
Fig. 1 Rembert Dodoens, Histoire des Plantes (ed. 1557)
Fig. 2 Nicholas Culpeper, Complete Herbal (ed. 1790)
II. Hannah Feake Bowne and the Art of Healing
In the early years of the Bowne House’s existence, Hannah Feake Bowne (c.1637-c.1677), the first wife of John Bowne, would have been responsible for the maintenance of the property's kitchen garden. It was on this small piece of land that Hannah would have grown the herbs required for at-home remedies, effectively designating her as the family healer. This role was likely imparted to her by her mother, Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallet (1610-c.1653), whose father was an apothecary in London. Before her first marriage, Elizabeth worked alongside her sister Martha in her father’s shop, wherein they learned about contemporary medical practices, recorded recipes, and produced homebrews (Wolfe 9). In her book Insubordinate Spirit: A True Story of Life and Loss in Earliest America, 1610-1665 (2012), Missy Wolfe describes Elizabeth Fones as an “expert in caring for the sick in her community, equipped as she was with the apothecary knowledge learned from her father, along with some alchemical knowledge she may have discussed with her scientifically-minded cousin, John Winthrop, Jr., and it is possible that she too became an able midwife” (43).
Elizabeth Fones’ connection to John Winthrop Jr. (her cousin and future father-in-law) is noteworthy, as he was both the governor of the Colony of Connecticut from 1659-1676 and a university-trained physician. His early encounters with medicinal and alchemical practices at the Fones’ apothecary shop may have informed his future educational pursuits. Further, Winthrop’s informational exchanges with medical women throughout his career exemplify the mutually beneficial relationships between trained physicians and female healers of the early colonial period in North America (Tannenbaum, 265). Yet, by the mid-eighteenth century, these partnerships grew more controversial as the physician class sought to establish themselves as ideologically opposed to folk medical practices.
In an effort to gain financial and professional superiority, educated medical practitioners of the North American colonies aimed to disassociate themselves from the work of rural midwives and healers. According to Theresa McCulla in her essay “Medicine in Colonial America” (2016), the work of these healers was consequently “derided as deceitful” which “narrowed dramatically the range of medical authority in the new American nation to white male physicians trained in European-influenced schools of thought.” These calculated efforts to devalue female participation in medicine and healing in early settlements has created an obvious gap in the historical record. Nevertheless, the extensive contributions of medical women in seventeenth and eighteenth-century North America were essential components in the overall survival and success of early colonial communities.