Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (Second Edition): A History of Women Healers (Contemporary Classics)

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

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

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.

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 hands of the barber-surgeons, obstetrical practice among the middle class was quickly transformed from a neighborly service into a lucrative business, which real physicians entered in force in the eighteenth century. Female midwives in England organized and charged the male intruders with commercialism and dangerous misuse of the forceps. But i

The new nurse—“the lady with the lamp,” selflessly tending the wounded—caught the popular imagination.

Witch hunts did not eliminate the lower-class woman healer, but they branded her forever as superstitious and possibly malevolent.

The witch was a triple threat to the Church: She was a woman, and not ashamed of it. She appeared to be part of an organized underground of peasant women. She was a healer whose practice was based in empirical study. In the face of the repressive fatalism of Christianity, she held out the hope of change in this world.

And while midwifery—female midwifery—is still a thriving occupation in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands,