«Be unto me as a precious ointment.: Lady Grace Mildmay, Sixteenth-Century Female Practitioner

Abstract

Lady Grace Mildmay's manuscripts represent an unusual presentation of three interrelated areas of family, devotion, and medicine. By examining her autobiography, meditations, and medical papers, 1 draw together literary analysis and discourses of female devotional and social practices with that of medical discourses to illustrate the ways in which women practitioners may have acquired and disseminated medical knowledge, and interacted with their patients, as well as how Lady Mildmay, and presumably other landed women practitioners, formed a textual community of women who administered medical treatment to lay people in late sixteenth-century England.