Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (2nd Ed.): A History of Women Healers (Contemporary Classics)

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of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich The stakes of the struggle were high: Political and economic monopolization of medicine meant control over its institutional organizations, its theory and practice, its profits and prestige. And the stakes are even higher today, when total control of medicine means potential power to determine who will live and will die, who is fertile and who is sterile, who is “mad” and who sane. In Western Europe, university-trained physicians already had a centuries’ old monopoly over the right to heal. But in America, medical practice was traditionally open to anyone who could demonstrate healing skills – regardless of formal training, race or sex. Ann Hutchinson, the dissenting religious leader of the 1600s, was a practitioner of “general physik,” as were many other ministers and their wives. The medical historian Joseph Kett reports that “one of the most respected medical men in late 18th century Windsor, Connecticut, for example, was a freed Negro called “Dr. Primus.” In New Jersey, medical practice, except in extraordinary cases, was mainly in the hands of women as late as 1818...” The Church associated women with sex, and all pleasure in sex was condemned, because it could only come from the devil. Witches were supposed to have gotten pleasure from copulation with the devil (despite the icy-cold organ he was reputed to possess) and they in turn infected men. Lust in either man or wife, then, was blamed on the female. On the other hand, witches were accused of making men impotent and of causing their penises to disappear. As for female sexuality, witches were accused, in effect, of giving contraceptive aid and of performing abortions:

Witches, Midwives and Nurses Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich Witches, Midwives and Nurses Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

These stereotypes have proved to be almost unbreakable. Today’s leaders of the American Nursing Association may insist that nursing is no longer a feminine vocation but a neuter “profession.” They may call for more male nurses to change the “image,” insist that nursing requires almost as much academic preparation as medicine, and so on. But the drive to “professionalize” nursing is, at best, a flight from the reality of sexism in the health system. At worst, it is sexist itself, deepening the division among women health workers and bolstering a hierarchy controlled by men. Conclusion In the US the male takeover of healing roles started later than in England or France, but ultimately went much further. There is probably no industrialized country with a lower percentage of women doctors than the US today: England has 24 percent; Russia has 75 percent; the US has only seven percent. And while midwifery – female midwifery – is still a thriving occupation in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, etc., it has been virtually outlawed here since the early twentieth century. By the turn of the century, medicine here was closed to all but a tiny minority of necessarily tough and well-heeled women. What was left was nursing, and this was in no way a substitute for the autonomous roles women had enjoyed as midwives and general healers. While the average regular doctor was making nurses welcome, the new scientific practitioners of the early 20th century were making them necessary. The new, post-Flexner physician, was even less likely than his predecessors to stand around and watch the progress of his “cures.” He diagnosed, he prescribed, he moved on. He could not waste his talents, or his expensive academic training in the tedious details of bedside care. For this he needed a patient, obedient helper, someone who was not above the most menial tasks, in short, a nurse.

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The distinction between “female” superstition and “male” medicine was made final by the very roles of the doctor and the witch at the trial. The trial in one stroke established the male physician on a moral and intellectual plane vastly above the female healer he was called to judge. It placed him on the side of God and Law, a professional on par with lawyers and theologians, while it placed her on the side of darkness, evil and magic. He owed his new status not to medical or scientific achievements of his own, but to the Church and State he served so well. The Aftermath Women made up some 85 percent of those executed – old women, young women and children. [We are omitting from this discussion any mention of the New England witch trials in the 1600s. These trials occurred on a relatively small scale, very late in the history of witch-hunts, and in an entirely different social context than the earlier European witch-craze.] We have our own moment of history to work out, our own struggles. What can we learn from the past that will help us – in a Women’s Health Movement – today? These are some of our conclusions:

What do witches and nurses have in common? | RCN Magazines

This pamphlet represents a beginning of the research which will have to be done to recapture our history as health workers. It is a fragmentary account, assembled from sources which were usually sketchy and often biased, by women who are in no sense “professional” historians. We confined ourselves to western history, since the institutions we confront today are the products of western civilization. We are far from being able to present a complete chronological history. Instead, we looked at two separate, important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe, and the rise of the male medical profession in 19th century America. Our oppression as women health workers today is inextricably linked to our oppression as women. Nursing, our predominate role in the health system, is simply a workplace extension of our roles as wife and mother. The nurse is socialized to believe that rebellion violates not only her “professionalism,” but her very femininity. This means that the male medical elite has a very special stake in the maintenance of sexism in the society at large: Doctors are the bosses in an industry where the workers are primarily women. Sexism in the society at large insures that the female majority of the health workforce are “good” workers – docile and passive. Take away sexism and you take away one of the mainstays of the health hierarchy. The lay practitioners were undoubtedly safer and more effective than the “regulars.” They preferred mild herbal medications, dietary changes and hand-holding to heroic interventions. Maybe they didn’t know any more than the “regulars,” but at least they were less likely to do the patient harm. Left alone, they might well have displaced the “regular” doctors with even middle class consumers in time. But they didn’t know the right people. The “regulars,” with their close ties to the upper class, had legislative clout. By 1830, 13 states had passed medical licensing laws outlawing “irregular” practice and establishing the “regulars” as the only legal healers. In fact, the first American nursing schools did their best to recruit actual upper class women as students. Miss Euphemia Van Rensselear, of an old aristocratic New York family, graced Bellevue’s first class. And at Johns Hopkins, where Isabel Hampton trained nurses in the University Hospital, a leading doctor could only complain that: Certain women seek to rival men in manly sports...and the strong-minded ape them in all things, even in dress. In doing so they may command a sort of admiration such as all monstrous productions inspire, especially when they aim towards a higher type than their own.Witches represented a political, religious, and sexual threat to the Protestant and Catholic churches alike, as well as to the State.” When faced with the misery of the poor, the Church turned to the dogma that experience in this world is fleeting and unimportant. But there was a double standard at work, for the Church was not against medical care for the upper class. Kings and nobles had their court physicians who were men, sometimes even priests. The real issue was control: Male upper class healing under the auspices of the Church was acceptable, female healing as part of a peasant subculture was not. Witch-healers were often the only general medical practitioners for a people who had no doctors and no hospitals and who were bitterly afflicted with poverty and disease. In particular, the association of the witch and the midwife was strong: “No one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives,” wrote witch-hunters Kramer and Sprenger.

Witches, midwives, and nurses: A history of women healers

Such was the state of medical “science” at the time when witch-healers were persecuted for being practitioners of “magic.” It was witches who developed an extensive understanding of bones and muscles, herbs and drugs, while physicians were still deriving their prognoses from astrology and alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold. So great was the witches’ knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the “father of modern medicine,” burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he “had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.” The Suppression of Women Healers Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that – as a woman – she dared to cure at all.

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The age of witch-hunting spanned more than four centuries (from the 14th to the 17th century) in its sweep from Germany to England. It was born in feudalism and lasted – gaining in virulence – well into the “age of reason.” The witch-craze took different forms at different times and places, but never lost its essential character: that of a ruling class campaign of terror directed against the female peasant population. Witches represented a political, religious and sexual threat to the Protestant and Catholic churches alike, as well as to the state.

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On a side note one of the great aspects of Silvia Federica’s more recent 'Caliban and the Witch' was its re-centering of a primary motivation of the witch trials away from the picture presented above of a patriarchal physician takeover of healthcare from women healers (processes which arguably were largely not contemporary), to instead being an assault on reproductive freedom emanating from a mercantilist ideological need to increase the population during the emergence of capitalism. Whatever criticism folks may have of Federici's wider statistics for the witch trails she points to good evidence for abortion, contraception and infanticide being the primary court offence for which the women were tried. This is an important clarification with major implications for the way we view the evolution of medical institutions, patriarchy, class power and population control...The US in 1800 could hardly have been a more unpromising environment for the development of a medical profession, or any profession, for that matter. Few formally trained physicians had emigrated here from Europe. There were very few schools of medicine in America and very few institutions of higher learning altogether. The general public, fresh from a war of national liberation, was hostile to professionalism and “foreign” elitisms of any type. The partnership between Church, State and medical profession reached full bloom in the witch trials. The doctor was held up the medical “expert,” giving an aura of science to the whole proceeding. He was asked to make judgments about whether certain women were witches and whether certain afflictions had been caused by witchcraft. The Malleus says: “And if it is asked how it is possible to distinguish whether an illness is caused by witchcraft or by some natural physical defect, we answer that the first [way] is by means of the judgment of doctors...” [Emphasis added]. In the witch-hunts, the Church explicitly legitimized the doctors’ professionalism, denouncing non-professional healing as equivalent to heresy: “If a woman dare to cure without having studied she is a witch and must die.” (Of course, there wasn’t any way for a woman to study.) Finally, the witch craze provided a handy excuse for the doctor’s failings in everyday practice: Anything he couldn’t cure was obviously the result of sorcery.