The Birth of Medical Credentials in Renaissance England

In Renaissance England, roughly 80 to 90 percent of all medical care was provided by women—mothers, daughters, aunts, and neighbors who treated illness cheaply or for free. Yet these domestic healers left almost no written records, while the men who would become physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries built the institutional frameworks that still shape medicine today. Dr. Alanna Skuse, associate professor of literature at the University of Reading, argues in The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack that the 16th and 17th centuries mark the moment when people "are becoming like us" in their medical thinking, even as their actual treatments often seem bizarre or dangerous.

The Humoral Worldview

The conceptual bedrock of Renaissance medicine was the four humors: phlegm (cold and wet), melancholy (cold and dry), blood (hot and wet), and yellow bile or choler (hot and dry). Everyone had these four fluids circulating through their body, and health meant keeping them in balance. Skuse compares this to how we think about carbohydrates today—"everybody kind of knows that carbohydrates are a thing," but you only focus on them when you need to. The humors worked the same way: a constant background assumption, not something people consciously managed every day.