This is a guest post by Philippa Koch. Philippa Koch is the John W. Kluge Center Larson Fellow in Health and Spirituality. She is a professor at Missouri State University in the Religious Studies Department. Koch researches the history of religion in America, with a focus on colonial America and the Atlantic world. In her book project, Persistent Providence: Healing Body and Soul in Early America, she examines how Christian communities responded to sickness and epidemics in a context of ever-new medical and scientific developments.
I’m working on a project on women’s health and spirituality in the colonial world at the Kluge Center. For the first few weeks at the Library, I read every eighteenth-century midwifery manual I could find. Much of what I saw agreed with the prevailing interpretation of eighteenth-century medicine and the rise of male midwifery: medical knowledge required mechanical knowledge and skill; women were the machines on which to practice these skills.
There was, it seems, nothing spiritual about conception, childbirth, maternity, or early infant care. And yet, I had a hunch that there was something spiritual lingering in this newly mechanical medical world.
I found persistent moral and religious language, for example, in the calls to aid suffering humanity through improved, and male, medical knowledge; in the insistence that mother’s milk is best for a baby, if she will only sacrifice her vanity; and in the description of women’s bodies as “designed” by nature, or the “creator,” for childbirth.
One source in particular, however, was explicit in highlighting the intersection of spirituality and health. In the 1830s, Howard Horton published An Improved System of Botanic Medicine, a three-volume treatise on medicine, treatments, and, finally, “female complaints.” I ordered Horton’s book in the Library of Congress’s Rare Book Room, because I was curious how views might have changed by the 1830s on the American frontier. What I found, however, completely surprised me.
Horton began with a lengthy theory of medical knowledge couched in deep-seated religious—and explicitly Protestant—discourse about common access to medical knowledge. And he extended this democratizing theoretical perspective to his views on women’s knowledge and interventions in matters of their health.
