Jacqueline Félicie
Jacqueline Félicie was a medical practitioner in Paris during the early fourteenth century, specifically noted for her trial in 1322, where she faced accusations of practicing medicine illegally. Despite lacking formal university training, she asserted her competence and gained a reputation for successfully treating various ailments, including those of high-profile patients. Félicie's situation highlights the tensions between university-trained physicians and unlicensed practitioners in medieval Paris, a city bustling with both medical professionals and patients seeking care.
She was charged by the ecclesiastical court, which imposed penalties that included excommunication and fines, reflecting the broader societal restrictions against women in medicine at the time. Félicie openly defended her practice, stating that her work was beneficial to the public and arguing for the legitimacy of her methods, which included examining patients and administering treatments commonly associated with licensed physicians.
Her case symbolizes the struggles women faced in the medical field, challenging the prevailing stereotypes that portrayed female practitioners as lacking in skill or knowledge. Although her appeal ultimately failed, Félicie's story underscores the complexity of medical practice regulation in medieval society, particularly regarding gender and professional authority. The outcome of her trial remains uncertain, but it marks a significant moment in the history of medicine, illustrating the challenges of establishing professional legitimacy and the diverse roles of women in healing practices during that era.
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Jacqueline Félicie
Parisian medical practitioner
- Born: c. 1280
- Birthplace: Possibly Paris, France
- Died: After 1322
- Place of death: Unknown
Félicie challenged the legal restriction of medical practice to graduates of the University of Paris, which did not admit women as students, and successfully treated the patients that other physicians could not or would not help.
Early Life
Jacqueline Félicie (fehl-ih-zee) practiced medicine in Paris and its suburbs at the beginning of the fourteenth century. All of the extant information about Félicie’s life and work is contained in the record of a trial conducted against her and several other Parisians accused of practicing medicine illegally.
Félicie was accused in ecclesiastical court on August 11, 1322, of wrongfully assuming the function of a physician. The accusation carried the penalties of excommunication and a fine of sixty Parisian sous. Additionally, she was forbidden to practice medicine in Paris or its environs. Although she did not deny practicing medicine, she did appeal the economic and spiritual penalties imposed on her. Félicie insisted that her medical practice was legitimate, legal, and in the interest of the public good. Her appeal continued until November 2, 1322, when she was formally excommunicated. The records of her appeal provide a window into her life and medical practice.
Félicie’s trial testimony suggests that she was born in Paris around 1280. One of her patient-witnesses reported that her house was small. Because no husband or relatives are mentioned in the trial documents, it seems that Félicie lived by herself. Her patients knew her by her reputation, which seems to have spread to many different regions of the city and its suburbs.
It would be helpful at this point to discuss the professional and social atmosphere in which Félicie and other medical practitioners of Paris in the Middle Ages worked. Paris, during Félicie’s lifetime, was the largest city in Western Europe and an important political and intellectual center. It also contained a large number of medical practitioners. These practitioners fell into five rough categories: physicians, surgeons, barbers, empirics, and apothecaries.
Physicians, who were university trained and licensed, treated internal diseases by administering alterative drugs or plasters. In 1271, the physicians in Paris attempted to gain control over the practice of medicine within the city. In addition to revising the qualifications for the medical license granted by the university, they attempted to restrict the practice of surgeons, barbers, and apothecaries and to eliminate the practice of empirics.
The statute that the physicians passed in 1271 limited both surgeons and barbers, who could not attend the university, to manually operating on individuals who suffered from external or local conditions. Conditions that fell under their expertise included fractured bones, mangled limbs, open wounds, hernias, cataracts, urinary-tract stones, dental extractions, and gum surgery. They also performed bloodletting.
Physicians were prohibited from performing manual operations on these conditions because such treatments would identify surgeons and barbers as manual laborers of artisan status. Similarly, surgeons and barbers could not prescribe or administer potions, laxatives, or plasters because such activities would identify physicians as elite men of medical learning.
According to the statute of 1271, apothecaries mixed drugs at the physicians’ request but were not allowed to administer them. Like surgeons and barbers, however, apothecaries did not always abide by the university’s restrictions. All three groups continued to be caught administering potions, treating internal conditions, and usurping the role of a physician, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The practitioners who presented the greatest challenge to the university-trained physicians’ aspirations regarding the control of medical practice in Paris were the empirics. Physicians defined an “empiric” as any practitioner who acted independently of a guild, lacked a license, and was self-taught. The university vigorously prosecuted the empirics whom they accused of being unlearned, of making up remedies in their heads, and of endangering the lives of their patients.
The physicians’ portrayal of empirics as a danger to the public health allowed them to gain the support of popes and French kings in their appeals for more stringent regulation of medical practice in Paris. Their efforts, however, were largely unsuccessful in spite of royal and papal support. The university’s struggles to regulate and discredit empirics continued at least until the beginning of the seventeenth century.
In some instances the activities of empirics failed to catch the university’s attention. Many of those who were called empirics served a population that was too humble and poor to be of interest to the university-trained physicians. In other cases, the university-trained physicians and those they considered empirics competed for the same wealthy and even royal patients. Félicie represents an instance of competition between licensed university-trained physicians and unlicensed practitioners.
Life’s Work
Félicie was an ambitious and accomplished medical practitioner. Although she lacked a university education, she was able to compete with university-trained physicians to the extent that patient-witnesses at her trial supported her right to practice medicine regardless of her qualifications. Félicie also practiced the highest form of medicine, internal medicine, in spite of prejudices and legal restrictions against women in such a practice. Women could be surgeons and barbers because neither practice required a university degree. Because the university denied women admission, however, they could not legally practice as physicians. Finally, Félicie defended her right to continue practicing on the basis of her own competence.
All aspects of Félicie’s trial point to the fact that university-trained physicians saw her as a threat to their monopoly over medical practice in the city. Although some of Félicie’s patient witnesses were apparently of such low social status that she refused to accept payment from them for her services, she did collect forty Parisian sous from one shopkeeper after she had treated him successfully. Moreover, one patient witness reported that Félicie had treated the chancellor to the king for gout and the chancellor’s nephew for impotence.
These reports suggest that Félicie was competing with university-trained physicians for the same royal and bourgeois clientele. In fact, of the seven patient witnesses who were present at Félicie’s appeal, five had sought the care of licensed physicians before turning to Félicie. Moreover, in three of these cases the physicians in question were known members of the faculty of medicine at the university.
Félicie’s success as a physician is further confirmed by the accusations made against her. The physicians were particularly interested in establishing that she examined the urine and pulse of her patients and also administered potions and plasters. These accusations were confirmed by witness testimony. Four of the seven patient witnesses reported that Félicie took their pulse and examined their urine. All seven were offered potions or plasters. Such practices would have readily identified Félicie as a physician because they were the standard methods for discerning the nature of and treating internal illnesses. Moreover, the cases that Félicie treated concerned the types of conditions that physicians were known to treat, such as fevers, kidney problems, rheumatism, and doubling pain. Her performance apparently convinced her patients who, when asked whether or not they were aware that Félicie was lacking in education, answered that they had not inquired about her qualifications.
Having established that Félicie “posed” as a physician, the physicians attempted to characterize her as a dangerous fraud who practiced medicine haphazardly and at great risk to her patients. Witness testimony from Félicie’s trial, however, suggests that she enjoyed substantial success as a practitioner of medicine even without university medical training. This witness group included five individuals whom university-trained physicians were unable to help. Moreover, of the seven patient witnesses at her trial, all but one reported that they would not have recovered without the help of Félicie, that her potions healed them immediately, and that they had contacted her because of her reputation as a successful healer. The abstaining witness could not evaluate Félicie’s healing abilities because she had refused treatment.
Unable to prosecute Félicie for dangerous incompetence, the physicians challenged Félicie on the basis of her gender. Citing a law that prohibited women from practicing law, they argued that it was much worse for a woman to endanger a person’s life through her medical ignorance than it was for her to endanger the outcome of his legal case. Félicie countered this assertion with the claim that it was more proper for women patients to be treated by women than by men and that many women suffered needlessly because they were too ashamed to consult male doctors.
In short, the physicians could find no practical reason to prevent Félicie from practicing medicine. At the conclusion of her trial they dismissed all of her arguments as irrelevant on the basis that as an unlicensed practitioner of medicine she had violated the law. In other words, they disregarded all the particulars of her case for the purpose of defending their own privilege.
Félicie also challenged the law restricting medical practice to licensed practitioners. She suggested that her competence exempted her from the law that was intended to prevent those ignorant of the art of medicine from harming their patients. Because she had successfully healed patients whom other physicians could not help, she suggested that it was not in the public interest for her to stop practicing medicine. Finally, she challenged the university physicians’ authority to regulate medical practice for the city of Paris without consulting all other groups in the city who were affected by such regulation. All these appeals failed and Félicie was formally excommunicated on November 2, 1322.
Because Félicie’s trial is the only record of her life and accomplishments available, what happened to her after her excommunication is not clear. Medieval European Christians were expected to seek absolution from excommunications through repentance and penance. In France, all those who failed to seek absolution within a year of being excommunicated were deemed heretics and punished by secular law. Thus, Félicie’s trial probably marked the end of her medical career. At the time, she was approximately forty-two years old.
Significance
Although Félicie did not succeed in defending her right to practice medicine, her trial marks a significant episode in the history of the professionalization of medical practice. Félicie, as a medical practitioner who was not solely a midwife, confirms the existence of medieval women practitioners who treated men and women and a wide variety of illnesses successfully. Her competence and good practice contradict the rhetoric that developed coincident with the professionalization of medicine that characterized female practitioners as superstitious, ignorant, and dangerous. Also, her remarks challenging the university’s right to regulate medical practice, as well as the fondness with which her patient witnesses described her, reveal that not all members of medieval society felt that the university’s regulation of medicine was in their best interest.
Félicie’s case demonstrates the complexity of issues surrounding the professionalization of medical practice in medieval Paris, particularly as it applied to practitioners who were women. Although she did not deny that ignorant practitioners should be prevented from continuing their practice, she did challenge the idea that the university-trained physicians were the best medical practitioners, and she challenged the belief that these trained physicians were in the best position to judge for the citizens of the city who was ignorant and who was not.
Bibliography
Biller, Peter, and Joseph Ziegler. Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Suffolk, England: York Medieval Press, 2001. Addresses many of the questions regarding the relationship between heresy, theology, magic, and medicine that traditional histories of medicine often neglect.
Furst, Lilian R., ed. Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Addresses women healers and physicians from medieval Europe to twentieth century Europe and the United States. The chapters on medieval times, in particular, address the development of negative images of women healers.
Green, Monica. Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000. This collection of articles addresses the methodological questions inherent in the study of women’s healthcare and medical practice and synthesizes recent social and cultural histories on the subject.
Kibre, Pearl. Studies in Medieval Science: Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics and Medicine. London: Hambledon Press, 1984. The author is a critical figure in the study of the medieval university and medieval science. This collection includes a detailed discussion of the University of Paris’s attempt to restrict medical practice to licensed physicians.
Minkowski, William L. “Physician Motives in Banning Medieval Traditional Healers.” Women and Health 21, no. 1 (1994). Discusses Félicie’s case against the Parisian faculty and the Church as well as the history of women healers and the regulation of medieval medical practice.
O’Boyle, Cornelius. The Art of Medicine: Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250-1400. Boston: Brill, 1998. Discusses the history of the study and practice of medicine as art at the time of Félicie. Includes an extensive bibliography and index.
Siraisi, Nancy. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Synthesizes developments in medical learning and practice from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. The author’s comprehensive account recognizes different types of healers, including those who relied on spiritual remedies.