{"title":"Joanna Stephens and the Stone: credibility economy in the history of medicine.","authors":"Julie Walsh","doi":"10.1353/pbm.2023.0014","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 1740, Joanna Stephens (fl. 1720-1741) produced a recipe for a tonic that she claimed cured bladder stones. Although she had the support of some notable and powerful men in the medical community and empirical evidence that her tonic worked, it took two years of petitioning, discussing, and even (unsuccessfully) crowd-sourcing before Parliament relented and awarded her the sum she requested to take her tonic public. Stephens's interaction with the scientific community serves as a case study for how epistemic credibility shapes how communities hear, interpret, and react to testimonies of knowledge claims from marginalized community members. Stephens's position as an outsider, both qua woman and qua experimentalist, meant that she was effectively and almost immediately written out of her own story by learned and powerful men with who had both vested interests in the cure for the stone and epistemic prejudices that made it impossible for them to hear Stephens's claim that she had made a discovery.</p>","PeriodicalId":54627,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2023.0014","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 1740, Joanna Stephens (fl. 1720-1741) produced a recipe for a tonic that she claimed cured bladder stones. Although she had the support of some notable and powerful men in the medical community and empirical evidence that her tonic worked, it took two years of petitioning, discussing, and even (unsuccessfully) crowd-sourcing before Parliament relented and awarded her the sum she requested to take her tonic public. Stephens's interaction with the scientific community serves as a case study for how epistemic credibility shapes how communities hear, interpret, and react to testimonies of knowledge claims from marginalized community members. Stephens's position as an outsider, both qua woman and qua experimentalist, meant that she was effectively and almost immediately written out of her own story by learned and powerful men with who had both vested interests in the cure for the stone and epistemic prejudices that made it impossible for them to hear Stephens's claim that she had made a discovery.
期刊介绍:
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal whose readers include biologists, physicians, students, and scholars, publishes essays that place important biological or medical subjects in broader scientific, social, or humanistic contexts. These essays span a wide range of subjects, from biomedical topics such as neurobiology, genetics, and evolution, to topics in ethics, history, philosophy, and medical education and practice. The editors encourage an informal style that has literary merit and that preserves the warmth, excitement, and color of the biological and medical sciences.