The Incomparable Lady Ranelagh: Medicine, Authority, and the Older, Smarter Sister of Robert Boyle

The late 1660s were busy years for the family of the renowned and brilliant chemist Sir Robert Boyle.  His brother's children were ill.  But the family did not send for him.  Instead, they sent for his sister, Lady Ranelagh, asking her to gather medicines and make some of her famous pills.  The infant Duke of Kendall died.  Lady Ranelagh attended the autopsy, examined the child's swollen brain, and gave her opinion as to the cause of death.  Robert Boyle himself suffered a stroke; so he sent for the family's best physician, Lady Ranelagh.  At the same time, the Incomparable Lady Ranelagh's religious tracts were being translated, transcribed, and circulated throughout the godly networks of England and the Continent.  And, to cap it all off, Lady Ranelagh was involved in politics at the very highest level – so involved, in fact, that the Lord Chancellor himself was speculating whether it was entirely proper to have her "consulted with about what relates to the business of the country."

Thus the epithet "Incomparable," used routinely to preface "Lady Ranelagh" in her lifetime, seems to have been entirely appropriate.  Operating in the realms of medicine, politics, and piety, she was well known for excelling at all of them.  Moreover, she seamlessly combined her social, political, and intellectual identities, deploying them in such a way as to make her presence felt at the very highest levels.

Yet it is the argument of this paper that while the level of Lady Ranelagh's work may have been unique, the shape of it was not.  She was, in fact, merely a rather brilliant example of a phenomenon that was taking place throughout Restoration England, as female medical practitioners learned to craft their professional identities from a combination of their social status, political understanding, and medical expertise.