Barbara Ehrenreich

A History of Women Healers (Glass Mountain Pamphlets)

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses

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Professionalism in medicine is nothing more than the institutionalization of male upper-class monopoly. We must never confuse professionalism with expertise. Expertise is something to work for and to share; professionalism is—by definition—elitist and exclusive, sexist, racist, and classist. In the American past, women who sought formal medical training were too ready to accept the professionalism that went with it. They made their  gains in status—but only on the backs of their less privileged sisters—midwives, nurses, and lay healers. Our goal today should never be to open up the exclusive medical profession to women, but to open up medicine—to all women. 

There is no historically consistent justification for the exclusion of women from healing roles. Witches were attacked for being pragmatic, empirical, and immoral. But in the nineteenth century the rhetoric reversed: women became too unscientific, delicate, and sentimental. The stereotypes change to suit male convenience—we don’t, and there is nothing in our “innate feminine nature” to justify our present subservience.

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.

Healing, in its fullest sense, consists of both curing and caring, doctoring and nursing. The old lay healers of an earlier time had combined both functions, and were valued for both. (For examples, midwives not only presided at the delivery, but lived in until the new mother was ready to resume care of her children.) But with the development of scientific medicine, and the modern medical profession, the two functions were split irrevocably. Curing became the exclusive province of the doctor; caring was relegated to the nurse.

Nightingale  was a little obsessive on this point. When she arrived in the Crimea with her newly trained nurses, the doctors at first ignored them all. Nightingale refused to let her women lift a finger to help the thousands of sick and wounded soldiers until the doctors gave an order. Impressed, the doctors finally relented and set the nurses to cleaning up the hospital.

The finished product, the Nightingale nurse, was simply the ideal Lady, transplanted from home to the hospital, and absolved of reproductive responsibilities. To the doctor, she brought the wifely virtue of absolute obedience.  To the patient, she brought the selfless devotion of a mother.

Specifically, they were held responsible for the prevalence of puerperal sepsis and neonatal ophthalmia. Both conditions were easily preventable by techniques well within the grasp of the least literate midwife (hand-washing for puerperal sepsis, and eye drops for the ophthalmia.) So the obvious solution for a truly public-spirited obstetrical profession would have been to make the appropriate preventive techniques known and available to the mass of midwives.

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.

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.

Incantations, and quasi-religious rituals were thought to be effective: the physician to Edward II, who held a bachelor’s degree in theology and a doctorate in medicine from Oxford, prescribed for toothache writing on the jaws of a patient, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” or touching a needle to a caterpillar and then to the tooth. A frequent treatment for leprosy was a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.

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.

Then, in the thirteenth century, there was a revival of learning, touched off by contact with the Arab world. Medical schools appeared in the universities, and more and more young men of means sought medical training. The church imposed strict controls on the new profession, and allowed it to develop only within the terms set by Catholic doctrine. University-trained physicians were not permitted to practice without calling in a priest to aid and advise them, or to treat a patient  who refused confession. By the fourteenth century their practice was in demand among the wealthy, as long as they continued to take pains to show that their attention to the body did not jeopardize the soul. 

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. 

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 through priests and doctors rather than through peasant women.

But three central accusations emerge repeatedly in the history of witchcraft throughout northern Europe: First, witches are accused of every conceivable sexual crime against men. Quite simply, they are “accused” of female sexuality. Second, they are accused of being organized. Third, they are accused of having magical powers effecting health—of harming, but also of healing. They were often charged specifically with possessing medical and obstetrical skills.

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.

The witch craze took different forms at different times and place, 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.

To know our history is to begin to see how to take up the struggle again.

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 who will die, who is fertile and who is sterile, who is “mad” and who is sane.

We are told that our subservience is biologically ordained: women are inherently nurse-like and not doctor-like. Sometimes we even try to console ourselves with the theory that we were defeated by anatomy before we were defeated by men, that women have been so trapped by the cycles of menstruation and reproduction that they have never been free and creative agents outside their homes. Another myth, fostered by conventional medical histories, is that male professionals won out on the strength of their superior technology. According to these accounts, (male) science more or less automatically replaced (female) superstition—which from then on was called “old wives’ tales.

The suppression of the “witches” and the later, less violent elimination of midwives and aspiring female doctors in the United States are hardly the only instances in history of willfully squandered talent, education, and experience. Human intellectual progress proceeds, to the extent that it does at all, only haltingly, with ghastly interruptions for the slaughter of suspicious individuals or groups, colonial extirpations of indigenous cultures, and backslidings into religiously imposed ignorance. Sometimes an important task for progressives is the “conservative” one of recovering, or at least pointing out, what was lost.

Healing was considered suspicious because it “did not rely on confession of sin” to clergy, and disease was still thought to be caused by either God or the Devil.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses A History of Women Healers (Glass Mountain Pamphlets)

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