‘A Most Precious and Excellent Balm’: The Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Papers of Lady Grace Mildmay 1552-1620.

Medical recipe books in the early modern period provide an insight into the important role that women played in health care. The knowledge and experience they imply have been seen largely as a ‘gendered knowledge form’, drawn from and spread through female networks. Grace Mildmay is recognised for her autobiographical, devotional and medical writings. This paper seeks to re-examine her medical recipes, notes and correspondence to understand how far her practice conformed to current thinking and how it compared with other gentlewomen medical practitioners and contemporary physicians. It explores her sources of information and evidence that her recipes were applied in an extensive practice for the poor. She was distinctive in her extensive theoretical understanding and the number of Paracelsian chemical medicines she employed. Her recipes include detailed case-histories which compare with those found in the notebooks of physicians. There is, however, no evidence that she shared recipes with other women and most of her surviving correspondence and recipe attributions relate to medical men. Motivated as she was by Protestant piety, her papers provide a rich example of the knowledge and sophistication of which women were capable in their medical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]