This essay explores the social processes
surrounding the creation of knowledge about children’s medicine in early
modern England. Looking first at printed volumes on children’s health
by male authors, the essay shows that the men who were the first to
print texts about children’s medicine recommended, replicated and
authorized women's knowledge in the field, even as they also constructed
women as subordinate observers. The essay then takes up the question of
how women constructed authority for themselves in domestic medicine by
looking at the affinities of women's knowledge practices with learned
medicine, particularly their investment in observation and proof. The
essay concludes with an examination of rickets, which exemplifies the
key role of women in knowledge formation around children’s diseases. It
shows how women’s experiential knowledge and domestic practices provided
a largely unacknowledged influence on one of the first learned texts on
rickets, A Treatise of the Rickets (1651).
