Historical Medical Library
Documenting Healing Networks: Elizabeth Coates Paschall’s Eighteenth-Century Medical Recipe Book
Virtual Event
Join us for our virtual program "Documenting Healing Networks: Elizabeth Coates Paschall’s Eighteenth-Century Medical Recipe Book"!
About this Event:
In her 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 manuscript, which is held at The College of Physicians, is a uniquely discursive document. Paschall described her patient’s symptoms and outcomes, as well as the 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 natural philosophers. 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 Susan Brandt's book, "Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia", she argues that women were on the frontlines of grassroots medical and scientific knowledge production in early Philadelphia.
About the Speaker:
Susan Hanket Brandt, PhD:
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.
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