Alisha Rankin’s book examines the medical activities of noblewomen in early modern Germany. It proposes that the noblewomen’s medical practices should be viewed as part of the history of science in European courts and of the wider world of early modern science. This is one of the first in-depth studies to situate elite women’s healing within a broader context of early modern medical culture. Rankin argues that ‘noblewomen became fêted healers not in spite of their gender, but because of it’ and that healing was something that German ‘princesses did’ (p. 3). Furthermore, she claims that the local and epistolary communities of these gentlewomen’s courts helped develop an interest in empiricism and experiential knowledge as a means of assessing medical efficacy.
The book is divided into two sections. Part I...
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.