Interview with Nursing Clio Prize 2025 Winners, Lisa Smith and Cathy McClive

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Nursing Clio’s sixth annual best article prize competition was awarded to Cathy McClive, Ben Weider Professor in French Revolutionary Studies and Professor of History at Florida State University, and Lisa Smith, Senior Lecturer in History and Faculty Dean of the Humanities at the University of Essex, for their article, “Women at the Centre: Medical Entrepreneurialism and ‘La Grande Médicine’ in Eighteenth-Century Lyon,” published in French History.

In the article, McClive and Smith recover the healthcare practice of two Lyonnais women, Marie Magdeleine Grand and Marie Fiansons, who operated a successful business tending to their local community. Gleaning insights from serendipitously preserved documents in the Municipal Archives of Lyon and the Departmental Archives of Rhône, McClive and Smith argue that Grand and Fianson offer an illustrative example of women practitioners labouring not “on the margin” as the historiography often claims but rather “at the centre” of everyday medical activities.

I had the pleasure of discussing the process, surprises, influences, and even friendship that went into the article’s creation.

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Jakob: A well-deserved congratulations on your win! This article appeared as a part of French History’s 2024 special issue celebrating Colin Jones.^[1] Was writing as part of this collection a divergence for you? Could you tell readers about where you see this article fitting into both of your larger research agendas?

Lisa and Cathy: This article is not really a step away from our larger research agendas, but more of a circling back to where we started as PhD students, who became friends through the subject of early modern women’s health and bodies. Since the article was written in response to Colin Jones’ retirement – Colin was Cathy’s supervisor at Warwick (she also co-edited the special issue) and Lisa’s external examiner during her studies at Essex – we were thinking back to his work on women practitioners. When we started our PhDs, we were propelled very much by a desire to make women visible, whether as patients or practitioners, which continues to frame all of our work.

Jakob: Speaking of making visible, as a fellow eighteenth-century French historian, I am just so awed by the insights that your article gives to readers about the quotidian experiences of Lyon’s urban community. What are some of the other significant aspects of the argument or article itself? How has this work changed your thinking going forward?

Cathy and Lisa: There has been a real binary in how we see women’s medical practices: elite/folk healers; men/women; domestic/paid. We have often assumed that women were just scraping by, picking up small bits within a care economy or undertaking the work charitably, rather than being entrepreneurial. This way of thinking has situated women medical practitioners (and sometimes working women in general) within a shadow economy or treated them as exceptional in some way. Our work shows two women who were actually central within the medical world and suggests ways in which other women, beyond the elite or religious women, may have been providing medical care. The most remarkable thing about the women in our article is that their paperwork survived – it is uncommon for such records to have remained – not their everyday medical activities.

Jakob: I think I speak for most every historian (or researcher with a taste of the archives) that there is nothing quite like the thrill of an exciting archival discovery because of the remarkable contingencies of history. In the article, you both talk about the numerous happenstances that seemed to contribute to the preservation of these women’s work. Could you tell us more about some of the surprising things you encountered while working in this article?

Cathy: Finding a caul in the archives! Absolutely. I’ve never seen a caul before, but I knew what it was immediately, even before I read the label, because it is so well preserved. It was wrapped in paper in the collection of paperwork collected by the city’s consular court, tucked away along with a number of other objects documenting nearly thirty years of the women’s medical commercialism.

Lisa: “[Finding the caul] must have been an amazing moment, though I have only seen the photographs… The other surprising thing is how the paperwork kept by Grand and Fiansons still survives, as there were so many reasons for it to have disappeared along the way. It is the serendipity that it survived and that Cathy accidentally noticed it (she went through the inventory by chance while waiting for another document), and then she later realized it corresponded to another set of papers in another archive. It is very rare to find such detailed material on women’s everyday medical practice – and no wonder, with all the accidents it took for this one to become visible in the first place!

Jakob: Though its occurrences are increasingly common, co-authorship is still fairly rare in historical scholarship. The two of you, as you said, have been intellectual compatriots since you were in graduate school. Can you tell us a bit about the process and your experiences with co-writing?

Lisa: I have done a lot of co-authorship and can attest that the process and experience change with every group of writers – or, as we have been finding as we tackle another Grand and Fiansons article, for different projects. But it is always a deeply enriching process.

Cathy and Lisa: For us, it was a process of regular conversations about the documents, about ideas, about readings, and about our daily life. It was through conversations that the writing began to take shape and also kept us on top of the work during some challenging personal times. Sometimes as a writer it can be hard to get started or to keep going, but the friendship side of the writing gave us extra impetus to stick to the commitment – both in terms of not letting each other down, but also as a way of giving us good reasons to show up! We sweated through the writing, as well as laughed a lot. But the writing became a joyful activity and respite from other cares, maybe even therapy.

Jakob: Well it all comes together seamlessly. I know all of our readers will be excitedly awaiting the next article you two write on Grand and Fiansons, as well as all the other irons you have in the fire! Congratulations again, to you both, for this wonderful and important article.

Notes

1. With a career spanning decades, Colin Jones has authored more than twenty books and more than fifty articles on topics ranging from early modern medicine, the origins of the French Revolution, and the history of Paris. His work as a scholar and educator has earned him standing as one of most important historians of France, particularly of the long eighteenth century. For an overview of his career, see Sarah Easterby-Smith, Cathy McClive, Richard Taws, Charles Walton, “Colin Jones: Fox and Hedgehog historian of France,” French History 38, no.1 (2024): 2–10. ↑