Book Announcement – Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, by Sharon Strocchia
Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019) One of the most striking features to emerge from recent studies of Renaissance medicine is the sheer diversity of female practitioners who anchored a wider medical economy. Thanks to a growing body of scholarship, we know that women from northern Europe to the Mediterranean basin permeated every aspect of healthcare services between 1400 and 1700. The household remained the primary locus of care well into the eighteenth century, despite the proliferation of hospitals and other charitable institutions. Women from…