Medical Knowledge and Remedies for Wellbeing in Eighteenth-Century Domestic Lexicography

Two Case Studies

Abstract

Eighteenth-century cookery books traditionally organised women’s knowledge and expertise about household management and cooking. Having reached an ever-widening market precisely throughout this century, these works also proved to be a means through which women could play their part in the dissemination of medical knowledge, as many of them contained whole chapters devoted to the explanation and definition of diseases and illnesses and their remedies. However, given the subordinate status of women’s intellectual activities, the medical and scientific nature of these works has rarely been investigated. Since the sections about medicine were often organised in alphabetical order and according to almost encyclopaedia-like parameters, this genre has also been labelled as “domestic lexicography”: the aim of this paper is to provide a description the shaping and systematisation of medical knowledge within cookery books of the time. The titles considered here are Arabella Atkyns’ Family Magazine (1741) and Martha Bradley’s British Housewife (1758): such works conferred women a certain degree of authority precisely because of their association with domesticity, as these were used as learning aids to be consulted at home that brought together feminised and masculinised domains of knowledge (housekeeping and physick). The analysis focuses on the lexicographical framework, that is, the linguistic strategies used to organise, categorise, and communicate medical knowledge within the traditionally feminine genre of cookery books.