Sally Irvine retold medical history before 1830 to reflect women’s contributions. She used letters, diaries, parish records and local press, rather than books by men about men, to reveal the women who worked as wives, healers, midwives and practitioners.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women played important roles as healers and midwives using herbs they grew and learning from their mothers as evidenced in Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book. Mrs Jane Sharp (1641-1671) wrote the The Compleat Midwives Companion covering anatomy and delivery techniques and Sarah Stone The Complete Practice of Midwifery, a casebook of 40 or more complications of birth.

Medicine was about symptoms not prevention, yet Lady Montague Worsley (1689-1762) watched doctors take a scab from children suffering from small pox in Turkey and promoted the idea of inoculation to Britain.

After a man died his widow was granted legal status and many doctors’ widows continued to run the practice after their husband’s deaths through engaging assistants and partners. Jesse Leeder’s wife was surprisingly listed jointly with him as ‘master’ to a female apprentice, Ann Turner in 1757, itself a rare occurrence.

The invention of the forceps during the eighteenth century helped to medicalise childbirth and by the end of the nineteenth century men were preferred as midwives particularly in the cities and amongst the well-to-do and aristocracy. This was far less true in rural counties such as Suffolk where the traditional pattern of female midwife bringing in the family doctor only in a crisis was more prevalent. Near to home the Romantic poet of Aldeburgh George Crabbe (1754-1832) was forced by his father to be a surgeon’s apothecary and tried to gain skill as a male midwife. However his second delivery left both mother and child dead and his reputation and confidence in tatters.

To become a doctor you needed an education (for a physician a degree in classics) and money. So few women are known to have practised – Sarah Mapp was an infamous bonesetter in 1730 but by and large women were pushed into the domestic sphere. Only twenty-five female surgeons/ apothecaries were active in the 18^th century and none are recorded between 1800 and 1830.

Through writing her PhD in 2012, Sally discovered that women’s role in medicine up to 1840 was useful but not professionally recognised. Sally’s in-depth, beautifully presented talk, of which I have skimmed the surface, needs to be published as a book.  (Summary: Vanessa Raison)