I went to the Wellcome Collection in London last week to visit a very important exhibition they have on at the moment.
This new exhibition explores the protective practices and beliefs around pregnancy, childbirth, and infertility that existed in mediaeval times and continue through to today. However, my interest in going was to see the star of the show—an actual surviving mediaeval pregnancy protection scroll.
Join Dr Romany Reagan and Kerry Lemon for an exclusive after-hours event at the Museum of the Home, followed by a group walk to Ruup & Form for an intimate viewing of SIMPLING led by the artist. We’ll begin in the herb gardens at the Museum of the Home, where there will be a wine reception and access to explore the Gardens Through Time after hours. Then Romany will give a talk exploring the roots of women-led fertility management through the lens of herbal history. We’ll uncover the often-overlooked practices of mediaeval and early modern healers — women who passed down their knowledge orally, from mother to daughter, from midwife to apprentice. Their methods of community care were rarely recorded in written form, so uncovering these methods of reproductive control are their most secret knowledge of all.
Continue reading Live talk at the Museum of the Home in London, Thursday 12th June 2025, 6:30pm: ‘Ancient Herbal Remedies & Fertility Management — The Secrets of Mediaeval & Early Modern Midwives’Do you have mint tea in your cupboard? Grow rosemary in your garden? Or perhaps eat ginger when you have an upset stomach?
Then your home is a living museum, continuing the traditions that women have practised for hundreds of years for health and healing. This wisdom comes from the time when food was medicine, the kitchen was the apothecary, and healing was women’s domain.
Marking the close of the audio installation Women’s Weeds by Dr. Romany Reagan, you are invited to join us for a talk exploring the role of women in healing during the late mediaeval and early modern eras (15th to 17th centuries).
Herbal Remedies, Folk Medicine & Kitchen Physick: The Secrets of Mediaeval Women Healers will uncover how women shared healing practices in a sisterhood of secret knowledge that was handed down through generations.
This event marks the closure of Women’s Weeds. You can listen now to the audio installation in our gardens, or on Bloomberg Connects.
When we think of the eradication of the smallpox disease today, we think of the groundbreaking vaccine developed by Dr Jenner — but where did the original knowledge of smallpox inoculation (the knowledge on which the eventual vaccine was based) come from? We actually owe our thanks to the ancient practices kept alive by women healers in Greece, Turkey, China, India, and Africa. Basically, everywhere in the world *except* Western Europe…
In this video, I explain how the chaos of the English Civil War led to relaxed print censorship, increased literacy, and a boom time for female-focused medical books — the origin of the printed family herbal book.
In testimony at her trial in 1410, the surgeon Perretta Petone claimed that ‘many women’ like her were practising all over Paris. While she may have been exaggerating for rhetorical effect, Perretta was certainly right that she was not alone as a female in medical practice. From the famous Surgeon Hersende, who accompanies St Louis on Crusade in 1250 and who would later marry a Parisian apothecary, to various Jewish eye doctors in 15th-century Frankfurt, to phlebotomists at the French Dominican nunnery of Longchamp, to Muslim midwives at the royal court of Navarre—whether they were surgeons or optometrists, barbers or herbalists or simply ‘healers’ (metgessa, medica, miresse, or arztzatin), women were almost always among the range of practitioners who offered their services in the western European medical marketplace from the 12th through 15th centuries. (Green 2008 [b] 120)
A great diversity of women practised some form of medicine throughout Europe in the Middle Ages (500-1500). Medical historians have identified a wide variety of female practitioners—from various regions, faiths, and social classes—engaged in general healing as well as specialised branches of medicine, including surgery, barber-surgery, and apothecary. Moreover, these female practitioners had the freedom and legal right to practise their healing arts. These rights were not taken away in systematic broad measures until the 14th century.
The open existence of officially sanctioned women healers came sputtering to a halt with the widespread establishment of European universities and the accompanying degrees and licences necessary to practise medicine. A licence to practise medicine as a physician could only be obtained after completing a university education—and women were banned from attending university so… that should have been that.
Continue reading Hidden Histories of Jewish & Muslim Medical Women in Mediaeval EuropeA potted history of the exploitation of folk healers in Europe, as well as in conquered lands (the Americas, West Indies), in the 17th & 18th century by the professionalised medical community—with a special focus on how this impacted female folk healers.
Blackthorn & Stone 