Sharing Knowledge

Strong evidence suggests that women often shared their medical knowledge. Some women kept notebooks in which they included recipes from their friends. Sometimes these books were passed down through several generations of women who would add more recipes from their own experience. Other evidence of women’s networks comes from printed recipe books, which often reproduce remedies that had appeared in women’s private recipe books (called “receipt books”in the period). And of course, other women sometimes turned around and copied these printed remedies into their own recipe books. The result was an invaluable accumulation of medical insight and experience.

In Jane Dawson's cookbook, pictured above, many recipes are followed by the name of a woman -- Mrs. Warton, Mrs. Pelham, etc. -- demonstrating both that Jane Dawson copied or was given these recipes by another woman and that another woman had successfully used the remedy. In one dramatic example, she writes that Mrs. Warton "saved a woma[n]s life with this that was given over for dead."