CURES FOR “CODS”: VENEREAL DISEASE, MEDICAL CULTURES, AND DOMESTIC HEALING IN LONDON, 1750-1800

ardis, grace

CURES FOR “CODS”: VENEREAL DISEASE, MEDICAL CULTURES, AND DOMESTIC HEALING IN LONDON, 1750-1800

Authors

ardis, grace

Abstract

This thesis on venereal disease aims to shed light on late eighteenth-century London’s gendered medical cultures, which affected both male and female practitioners. Through an examination of surgeons’ medical treatises, it shows how masculine competition in the medical marketplace resulted in male practitioners ignoring female sufferers and denigrating women healers. This research also examines women Londoners’ medical contributions to the treatment of venereal disease in the domestic sphere in the late eighteenth century. By viewing the contents of household recipe books through a critical lens and by reshaping the definitions of what it means to be a healer, my research introduces another practitioner into the medical world of venereal disease: the middle- to upper-class wife