Scalpels in shadow: The lost history of France's female surgeons

Abstract

This article examines the long-standing claim that French surgery was an exclusively male profession from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. It maps the social, economic, and legal mechanisms that gradually erased women practitioners between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries by analyzing four interlocking source sets: tax registers and guild rolls that record occupational identities; royal ordinances, apprenticeship contracts, and hospital regulations that define professional boundaries; iconographic and epigraphic material that visualizes or names women at work; and contemporary medical treatises that reveal shifting gendered vocabularies. Combining quantitative prosopography with close reading of normative texts, the study traces how craft professionalization, linguistic masculinization, and institutional reforms narrowed women's access to surgical labor. The resulting methodological framework equips historians to detect marginalized healers in archives compiled largely by and for men, and invites a broader, more inclusive rewriting of early-modern surgical history.

Keywords: Early-modern France; Guild history; Medical historiography; Prosopography; Women surgeons.