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

Product Information

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.” 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 humane, empirical approach to healing. There was nothing in late medieval medical training that conflicted with church doctrine, and little that we would recognize as “science.” Medical students, like other scholarly young gentlemen, spent years studying Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology. Their medical theory was largely restricted to the works of Galen, the ancient Roman physician who stressed the theory of “complexions” or “temperaments” of men, “wherefore the choleric are wrathful, the sanguine are kindly, the melancholy are envious,” and so on. While a student, a doctor rarely saw any patients at all, and no experimentation of any kind was taught. Medicine was sharply differentiated from surgery, which was almost everywhere considered a degrading, menial craft, and the dissection of bodies was almost unheard of.

Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, has

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 The job of initiating a witch trial was to be performed by either the Vicar (priest) or Judge of the County, who was to post a notice to In other words, professions are the creation of a ruling class. To become the medical profession, the “regular” doctors needed, above all, ruling class patronage.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. But the real answer is not in this made-up drama of science versus ignorance and superstition. It’s part of the 19th century’s long story of class and sex struggles for power in all areas of life. I don't mention this to paint a happy picture of everything in healthcare being great (it isn't!) but merely as a corrective to a perspective I often come across from friends who don't work in healthcare but who's perspective on struggles within it are primarily shaped by texts from the 1970s.

Witches, Nurses, and Midwives: How They Connect - The Gypsy Nurse Witches, Nurses, and Midwives: How They Connect - The Gypsy Nurse

The senses are the devil’s playground, the arena into which he will try to lure men away from Faith and into the conceits of the intellect or the delusions of carnality. 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:Witches lived and were burned long before the development of modern medical technology. The great majority of them were lay healers serving the peasant population, and their suppression marks one of the opening struggles in the history of man’s suppression of women as healers.

nurses and midwives were branded witches in New study shows nurses and midwives were branded witches in

In the eyes of the Church, all the witches’ power was ultimately derived from her sexuality. Her career began with sexual intercourse with the devil. Each witch was confirmed at a general meeting (the witches’ Sabbath) at which the devil presided, often in the form of a goat, and had intercourse with the neophytes. In return for her powers, the witch promised to serve him faithfully. (In the imagination of the Church even evil could only be thought of as ultimately male-directed!) As the Malleus makes clear, the devil almost always acts through the female, just as he did in Eden: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.

Witches, Midwives, And Nurses (2nd Ed.): A History of Women Witches, Midwives, And Nurses (2nd Ed.): A History of Women

Now the motive of the will is something perceived through the senses or the intellect, both of which are subject to the power of the devil. For St. Augustine says in Book 83: This evil, which is of the devil, creeps in by all the sensual approaches; he places himself in figures, he adapts himself to colors, he attaches himself to sounds, he lurks in angry and wrongful conversation, he abides in smells, he impregnates with flavours and fills with certain exhalations all the channels of the understanding.WITCHES LIVED AND WERE BURNED LONG BEFORE the development of modern medical technology. The great majority of them were lay healers serving the peasant population, and their suppression marks one of the opening struggles in the history of man’s suppression of women as healers. The other side of the suppression of witches as healers was the creation of a new male medical profession, under the protection and patronage of the ruling classes. This new European medical profession played an important role in the witch hunts, supporting the witches’ persecutors with “medical” reasoning:” 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.