Q U I C K L I N K S

To learn more about the engraver of the 17th-century head-piece pictured to the left, see the IN BRIEF biography for Wenceslaus Hollar.

Also see the IN BRIEF biography for the wealthy charcoal merchant, concert promoter, and book collector, Thomas Britton (1644–1714), who owned a copy of Mary Trye’s Medicatrix, or, The Woman-Physician (in addition to works by Margaret Cavendish, Anna Maria van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, and Elizabeth Cellier). Britton’s trade as a “Smallcoal-Man” made him “an apt, enthusiastic, and original pupil in the science of chemistry.”

To learn about another woman practicing medicine around the same time as Mary Trye, see the biography for Susan Holder in the IN BRIEF section of She-philosopher.com.

For full bibliographical descriptions of any works cited here, see:

• for pre-20th-century works, She-philosopher.com’s selected list of Primary Sources

• for 20th-century and 21st-century works, She-philosopher.com’s selected list of Secondary Sources

For more about forthcoming projects planned for this website, see the PREVIEWS section.

THE PLAYERS > Mary Trye > Mary Trye as chemical physician, medical reformer, and early promoter of evidence-based health interventions

First Published: March 2012
Revised (substantive): 1 June 2021

Under Construction

S O R R Y, but this section is still under construction.

17th-century head-piece showing six boys with farm tools, by Wenceslaus Hollar

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B Y W A Y O F I N T R O D U C T I O N

Mary Trye was a chemical physician, with a medical practice first in Warwick, then in London, and “one of the few early modern women medical practitioners to publish a book” — an octavo entitled Medicatrix, or, The Woman-Physician (London, 1675). Trye’s publication is a unique entry in the “increasingly abusive” science wars of the 17th century, initiated by the “extream rash and imprudent” Henry Stubbe — a Warwick physician with an American connection, a radical Independent & republican polemicist, author of one of the earliest appreciations in English of Islam, and the first writer on climate change to be published (1667) in a scientific journal.

Mary Trye opposed the Galenical approach to medicine, taking on Stubbe and the male medical establishment — which she accused of arrogance, laziness, and an over-reliance on surgical instruments (lancet, probe, knife) and the practice of phlebotomy, to the exclusion of pharmaceutical cures which preserved, rather than removed, “the blood and vital Spirits in the body” — in her polemical “Vindication” of the new iatrochemistry and of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge.

My first webessays introducing the “Woman-Physician,” Mary Trye (fl. 1662–75) and her antagonist, the polymath physician Henry Stubbe (1632–1676), have been relocated at the subdomain known as Roses (scroll down to the links for Stubbe and Trye; both webessays are designed to open in a small, floating 2nd window).

You can also access the new illustrated introductory essay on Mary Trye (created 4/14/2016) and the companion introductory essay on Henry Stubbe (also created 4/14/2016) directly from the annotated list of links at the sitemap for the subdomain Roses.CommunicatingByDesign.com.

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