Lyn Bennett is an associate professor of English at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. Her interest in rhetoric, writing, and medicine informs her teaching as well as her research. She is the author of Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric in the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer (2004) and her work also appears in publications as diverse as Christianity and Literature, Genre, and the Journal of Medical Humanities.

• Introduction. 'Their plausible rhetoric'; Part I. Rhetoric and Medicine: 1. 'Another mans profession': physicians and clerics; 2. 'Onely the learned': physicians, empirics, and women; 3. 'An eloquent tongue': physicians and patients; Part II. The Woman Writer: 4. 'Publishing those truthes': women and affliction; 5. 'Hard words and rhetoricall phrases': women and learned medicine; 6. 'A bare physician stuft with words': women and domestic healing.

'Lyn Bennett's … detailed new book offers an original perspective on the development of the medical profession in the seventeenth century.' Aurélie Griffin, Modern Language Review