Reading Powders: Gender, Drugs, and the “Foreign” in Early Modern England

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to situate debates across early modern English medicine within a spatial geography and material contingency, allowing for a nuanced understanding of seventeenth-century networks of scientific exchange and medical practice. To do so, I tie together historiographical approaches pertaining to domestic medicine in early modern England, the global medical marketplace, and witchcraft by tracing a medical material: powders. A nuanced understanding of early modern negotiations of power emerges by examining how and why ambiguous substances such as powders were being debated by licensed physicians. This article seeks to understand 1) how were ambiguous and controversial substances being handled by the medical elite, 2) how did medical debates over powders intersect with social debates, 3) did women utilize these debated substances and, if so, what was the response? An interesting conflict emerges: elite debates over materiality acted as a vehicle for undermining the role of women and the uneducated in medicine, but women still utilized powders and engaged in ongoing medical debates through their work. I argue that, despite top-down attempts to control female medical knowledge, the plasticity of the home and the marketplace allowed women to continue engaging with healing and knowledge creation. My work critically highlights the complex ways that scholarly debates amongst elite physicians were inextricably tied to the quotidian lives of everyday medical practice in the home, engendered by the knowability of substances from around the globe.