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

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The devil was believed to have real power on earth, and the use of that power by peasant women – whether for good or evil – was frightening to the Church and State. Every man his own doctor,” was the slogan of one wing of the Movement, and they made it very clear that they meant every woman too.

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

At the same time, the number of hospitals began to increase to keep pace with the needs of medical education. For the woman who chose to express her feminine drives outside of the home, these occupations were presented as simple extensions of women’s “natural” domestic role. The “regular,” licensed, doctors were attacked as members of the “parasitic, non-producing classes,” who survived only because of the upper class’ “lurid taste” for calomel and bleeding.

Throughout the latter part of the 19th century, the “regulars” relentlessly attacked lay practitioners, sectarian doctors and women practitioners in general. Working class radicals rallied to the cause, linking “King-craft, Priest-craft, Lawyer-craft and Doctor-craft” as the four great evils of the time.

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A profession attains and maintains its position by virtue of the protection and patronage of some elite segment of society which has been persuaded that there is some special value in its work. By the fourteenth century their practice was in demand among the wealthy, as long as they continued to take pains to show that their attentions to the body did not jeopardize the soul.

The witch-hunts were well-organized campaigns, initiated, financed and executed by Church and State. Woman is the mother of the race,” gushed Boston feminist Julia Ward Howe, “the guardian of its helpless infancy, its earliest teacher, its most zealous champion. The rare woman who did make it into a “regular” medical school faced one sexist hurdle after another.