Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (Second Edition): A History of Women Healers (Contemporary Classics)

According to these accounts, (male) science more or less automatically replaced (female) superstition—which from then on was called “old wives’ tales.”

Medical theories were often grounded more in “logic” than in observation:

Instead, what could have been a proud occupation for women and a field for lively intellectual inquiry was discredited when not actually obliterated, so that later, when members of the educated elite sought to recapture some of the lost knowledge of the natural world, they had to turn to fairly marginal remnants of the old healing tradition.

There was not a lot to read at the time, the entire genre of books on “Women and . . .” having yet to be invented. Sometimes, in conventional histories of American medicine, we found tantalizing references to a time when women predominated as healers—but only as an indication of how “primitive” American medicine had been before the rise of the mode

Our subservience is reinforced by our ignorance, and our ignorance is enforced. Nurses are taught not to question, not to challenge. “The doctor knows best.” He is the shaman, in touch with the forbidden, mystically complex world of Science which we have been taught is beyond our grasp. Women health workers are alienated from the scientific substan

Witch hunts did not eliminate the lower-class woman healer, but they branded her forever as superstitious and possibly malevolent.

Compared to what we confronted in the 1970s, today’s American health care system features far more women as practitioners and even decision makers, but it is also more single-mindedly driven by profit.

The witch was a triple threat to the Church: She was a woman, and not ashamed of it. She appeared to be part of an organized underground of peasant women. She was a healer whose practice was based in empirical study. In the face of the repressive fatalism of Christianity, she held out the hope of change in this world.

And while midwifery—female midwifery—is still a thriving occupation in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands,