Medical Career
A 1685 advertisement entitled "Dr. Barker’s Famous Gout Plaister" provides physical evidence that Barker’s medical practice did exist. Sold for five shillings a roll at the bookshop of Benjamin Crayale (Barker’s first publisher), the plaster was said to have the power of "effect a perfect cure" within "twelve hours time." The advertisement was found on the last page of the anonymous literary work, Delightful and Ingenious Novels: being choice and excellent stories of amours, tragical and comical (1685). Corroborating evidences can also be found in Barker’s medical poems and novels: passages in A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies give detailed accounts of the medical practice of its heroine, Galesia (often identified by literary critics as Barker’s literary incarnation), who dispenses doctoral advice and prescribes medicine right out of her lodging.
There is no recorded evidence suggesting that Barker had any formal medical training, or sought a license (as many women of her time did) to establish herself as an authority. However, passages from A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies indicate that her elder brother may have given her an erudite medical education; in addition, her medical poem, "Anatomy" (found in Poetical Recreations), reveals her extensive knowledge of the academic medicine of her time.
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