Women have tended for the sick throughout time as healers, apothecaries, midwives and carers, and their books of family and traditional recipes are some of the best records of popular medical cures from the past. Lady Grace Mildmay (d. 1620), for example, made and dispensed vast batches of medicines for the ill near her Wiltshire home. Her often very complex recipes and notes about patients she treated have survived. Until the 16th century widows were able to take over their husband’s surgical practice if they could prove their competence – until Henry VIII put a stop to that with the charter for the Company of Barber Surgeons which stated that ‘No carpenter, smith, weaver or women shall practise surgery’. Despite sometimes high levels of knowledge and experience, women could not become licensed physicians in England until 1909, when the Royal College of Physicians passed a by-law allowing women to take the oral examination required for membership. The first woman to become a licentiate was approved in 1910 but it was not until 1934 that a woman, Helen Mackay, was elected as a fellow.

The woman who has become known as the first female physician in England, Elizabeth Garett Anderson (d. 1917) got her licence to practice by exploiting a loophole in the constitution of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, a trick the Society immediately closed to prevent other women from following suit. So in the four centuries from its foundation in 1518 by a Royal Charter from King Henry VIII, women were not eligible to become licensed physicians in England. For this, a medical degree was usually required, and women were excluded from the universities. Prospective candidates for the College had to pass the oral examination to demonstrate that they had a good overall education in addition to their medical degree. To obtain a fellowship of the body, and so obtain voting rights, the criteria were even narrower: they required a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. Nevertheless, women did work as doctors, and there are records of the College suing women in London for this.

In Restoration London, one woman, Mary Trye, unflinchingly adopted the title of physician for herself when she entitled her only known publication, Medicatrix; or the Woman Physician (1675), making the declaration in the title twice, once in Latin and again in the vernacular. The 1670s had already seen the publication of another book on health matters by the midwife Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (1671), in which Sharp offers the benefit of 30 years in practice for those training in her profession but it was still much against the run of things for a woman to publish books of medicine in her own name as these two women did. Unlike Sharp, Trye was not writing a textbook but as the full title of the book – The woman-physician vindicating Thomas O’Dowde, a chymical physician and royal licentiate, and chymistry, against the calumnies and abusive reflections of Henry Stubbe – made clear, it was partly written to defend her late father, Thomas O’Dowde, an apothecary-cum-chemical physician, from the accusations of his detractors, which were still coming almost a decade after his mid-1660s death.

O’Dowde was a controversial figure in his lifetime, an agent on the Royalist side in the Civil Wars, who was imprisoned in Nottingham for a time. After the Restoration, he was favoured by the king and worked as one of the grooms to the bedchamber to Charles II, during which he used his access to the Crown to petition for a separate society for chemical physicians. Chemical physicians were a group of practitioners who followed the ideas of the German-Swiss Renaissance physi­cian Theophrastus Aurelius von Hohenheim, self-styled Paracelsus (because his skills allegedly surpassed those of first century BCE Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus). The dominant humoral model (based on the idea of the four humours of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood) which underpinned most medical practice had been set down in pre-Christian times by figures like Hippocrates and Galen and this was problematic to some, like Paracelsus, in the 16th and 17th centuries. This new medicine proposed that the cosmos was composed of three active substances: mercury, which was transformative; sulphur, which was binding; and salt, which was stabilising. Ill health, then, resulted from a disfunction in the body’s chemistry rather than in its humours.

Another aspect of chemical medicine was that it was not just the purview of elitist university-educated physicians, and Paracelsus himself maintained that ‘The physician does not learn everything he must know and master at high colleges alone [&hellip] From time to time he must consult old women, gypsies, magicians, wayfarers, and all manner of peasant folk and random people, and learn from them’. This was with good reason since the often complex processes of mixing and distilling ‘kitchen physic’, which women like Lady Mildmay excelled at, had much in common with alchemy and the processes chemical physicians used. In the Restoration, proponents of chemical medicine did include some traditionally educated physicians, but mainly comprised men from other backgrounds, and O’Dowde himself was not a university-educated man.

O’Dowde published The Poor Man’s Physician in 1664, suggesting that wealth should not affect access to healthcare. However, rather than offer suggestions for inexpensive cures, like some medical treatises did, it advised consulting a physician like himself whose laboratory-manufactured treatments could, amongst other things, cure the plague in just six hours, something the Galenists could never achieve. This would prove an unfortunate claim when he himself perished in the Great Plague of 1665. O’Dowde had the support of 38 signatories to his proposal for a separate society, published in a later edition of The Poorman’s Physician, but although given a hearing the idea was rejected by the king and privy council in spring 1665 in the face of opposition from the College of Physicians. A fellow chemical practitioner, George Thomson, asserted that the claimed the College even commissioned a spy to gather evidence and discredit chemists by showing them to be quacks, unlike the classically educated, elite licensed physicians. During the controversy a number of pro- and anti-chemical medicine pamphlets were produced, and some chemical physicians also sought to distance themselves from the controversy and from O’Dowde.

One of the main points of difference between the chemists and the humoralists concerned bloodletting, which was traditionally thought to be a key way of removing bad humours. Diseases caused by chemical imbalance were thought by chemists to be best cured by chemicals since, as Mary Trye explained, ‘the Lord hath Created Medicines out of the Earth: And he that is wise may find them, but not without experiment’. Thompson wrote against the practice of bleeding sick patients in 1670 and called for impartial tests to be conducted to prove the matter one way or the other: ‘Now this Controversie between us concerning bleeding can either be conclusively resolved by equal experiments, or it cannot. If it cannot, then are we all alike groping in obscurity, never a barrel better Herring’. Essentially, he was saying that without agreeing to experiments to end the debate one way or the other, there was nothing to choose between the two factions. A key advocate of bloodletting was Henry Stubbe, not himself an RCP licensed physician, who wrote a number of treatises on the topic. One published in 1671 took direct aim at Thompson, An epistolary discourse concerning phlebotomy in opposition to G. Thomson pseudo-chymist .

Mary’s career
It is only because of Stubbe’s interventions into this debate that we have any record of Mary Trye’s work as a chemical physician and how she took over her father’s practice after his death. Mary was O’Dowde’s only child and was baptised as Mary Dowde on 30 July 1642 at St Clement Danes, Westminster, a parish to which her parents maintained connections throughout their lives, and near where her father’s chemical laboratory was situated, ‘against St Clements Church in the Strand’. She next enters the record on 13 December 1660 when at 18 Trye married for the first time to a merchant, Edward Stanthwaite. This marriage was dogged by financial trouble, such that in her will Trye’s mother Jane specified that her legacy of several hundred pounds be placed in trust if Stanthwaite was still alive upon her death, since she resented how much O’Dowde money the merchant had already run through.

By the time she was orphaned in 1665, Trye was already working alongside her father. In Medicatrix, she claimed to have ‘Twelve years Experience’ as a healer, meaning she began practicing medicine in her own right in 1662, aged 20, and she said it was only by chance that she was not out attending to patients with him on the day her father was exposed to the plague. Sometime after losing both her parents to the Great Plague of 1665 – her mother died of plague only nine days after her father – Trye was widowed, for she remarried on 17 June 1670. The marriage record states ‘Trye, Berkley, of St Paul, Covent Garden, Middlesex, gent, bachelor, about 30, and Mary Stanthwait, of same, widow, about 25 at Fulham or Hammersmith, co Middlesex, 17 June, 1670’. The couple had at least one child, a son called William born in November the following year.

The spur to write in defence of her father’s posthumous reputation was when she had sight of some of Henry Stubbe’s ‘private Notes and Manuscripts’. These notes apparently contained slurs on her father. Stubbe was nicknamed the ‘Medicus at Warwick’ by Trye, perhaps mocking his assumed superiority, among other less flattering sobriquets such as a latter-day ‘Sir John Falstaffe’. Stubbe was an outspoken and prolific author whose texts include remonstrations against the Royal Society, and political tracts on the wars with the Dutch. Stubbe was born in Ireland, like O’Dowde, but had been on the side of Parliament in the Civil Wars. He was a university-educated man, with both a BA and MA from Oxford in the mid-1650s, and took up medicine a few years later. After making peace with the restored monarchy, he obtained a post as the king’s physician to Jamaica in 1662. He did not reside in the Caribbean for long and was practicing medicine in Warwickshire by 1666. He was known to be an argumentative character and he soon became embroiled in the chemical medicine controversy, and published an attack on the Royal Society, meaning he was distanced even by people who inclined to the same view as him about medicine. In 1671 he published An Epistolary Discourse Concerning Phlebotomy, emphasising his adherence to the Galenic humoral bodily economy model. By contrast, Trye’s opposition to this procedure is alluded to on the frontispiece of her book which quotes from Leviticus 18.14: ‘For the Life of all flesh is the blood thereof’.

The tone of Medicatrix is assertive and unapologetic, claiming its author could ‘equal the Arguments of [Stubbe’s] Pen in those things that are proper for women to engage’. She makes a direct challenge to Stubbe, that she will cure two smallpox cases ‘by my Methods and Medicines’ for every one he can show he has cured by ‘Phlebotomy and his Method’. She did this in the knowledge that some would not take her opinions seriously because of her sex, writing ‘But certainly if I may speak my thoughts (though the Medicus may say a wamans [sic] thoughts signifie little)’. Trye was sensitive to the fact that women’s lack of access to higher education could be used against them in this regard. Indeed, her own father had been declared ‘illiterate’ by the College as he had no Latin. She countered this by arguing that some of the most educated men were lazy and some men ‘boasted of Letters, but understood not Medicines; Words were the perfection of their Practice’. Sharp too had railed against the assumed superiority of classically educated male practitioners, writing ‘It is not hard words that perform the work, as if none understood the Art [of midwifery] that cannot understand Greek. Words are but the shell, that we ofttimes break our Teeth with them to come at the kernel, I mean our brains to know what is the meaning of them; but to have the same in our mother tongue would save us a great deal of needless labour’. But Trye perhaps felt her lack of formal education was a hindrance to her for she vowed that ‘if I myself had never so many Children, if I could possibly do it, I would breed them Schollars’.

The book closes with an extended advertisement for the types of cures Trye could offer. She stated that she had inherited both the knowledge and the medicines necessary to ‘preserve the Body in Heath, and restore it to Health when lost’. She began with smallpox and claimed that her range of treatments including cordials, elixirs, and medicines were ‘so easie, safe, and effectual, and the Patient is put to so little trouble or hazard, that I never yet to this day knew of any Person that either my Father or myself gave Medicine too, that dyed of this Disease’. For all her feisty tone and assertiveness, Trye felt some topics were not appropriate to discuss in print. Her final paragraph, ‘Diseases attending Women’, states that the ‘diseases incident to this Sex are many, and not proper here largely to be discoursed on; therefore I purposely omit them’. In this she differs from Jane Sharp who supplied detailed descriptions of women’s diseases and their management. Trye reassured her reader that, nevertheless, she did have effective medicines for women’s diseases, if patients consulted her directly.

Medicatrix was completed at the end of 1674, when Trye was aged 32 and confident in her practice. According to Medicatrix, the Tryes were lodging in The Feathers, in the rural and upmarket area of Pall Mall. There is no record of how the book was received upon its publication the following year nor do there seem to be any responses in print. Perhaps Stubbe was entirely unaware of it since around the time of its publication he was back in Warwick practising medicine and writing a book on Islam, An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, which was not published until 1911. A year after the publication of Trye’s book, Stubbe was dead, drowned in a river near Bath in July 1676. Were it not for the provocation she took from Stubbe’s manuscripts, Trye wouldn’t have published her treatise and we would not have any record of this extraordinary female physician other than a footnote in her father’s biography saying he had only one child, Mary.