many of those who were prosecuted for witchcraft were in fact wise-women.”He

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 is now a wealth of information about women as lay healers, midwives, and “doctresses”

But history belies these theories. Women have been autonomous healers, often the only healers for women and the poor. And we found, in the periods we have studied, that, if anything, it was the male professionals who clung to untested doctrines and ritualistic practices—and it was the women healers who represented a more human, empirical approach t

The witch-healer’s methods were as great a threat (to the Catholic Church, if not the Protestant) as her results, for the witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to

but prayer was Church-sanctioned and controlled while incantations and charms were not. Thus magic cures, even when successful, were an accursed interference with the will of God, achieved with the help of the devil, and the cure itself was evil. There was no problem in distinguishing God’s cures from the devil’s, for obviously the Lord would work

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

Unfortunately, the witch herself—poor and illiterate—did not leave us her story. It was recorded, like all history, by the educated elite, so that today we know the witch only through the eyes of her persecutors.

The medical profession in particular is not just another institution which happens to discriminate against us: it is a fortress designed and erected to exclude us.