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

Compared to what we confronted in the 1970s, today’s American health care system features far more women as practitioners and even decision makers, but it is also more single-mindedly driven by profit.

Instead, what could have been a proud occupation for women and a field for lively intellectual inquiry was discredited when not actually obliterated, so that later, when members of the educated elite sought to recapture some of the lost knowledge of the natural world, they had to turn to fairly marginal remnants of the old healing tradition.

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.

WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HEALERS. THEY WERE THE unlicensed doctors and anatomists of Western history. They were abortionists, nurses, and counselors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging secrets of their uses. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without d

French and especially German scientists brought forth the germ theory of disease which provided, for the first time in human history, a rational basis for disease prevention and therapy.

Reformation and Counter-Reformation than we could in a short

There is now a wealth of information about women as lay healers, midwives, and “doctresses”

but prayer was Church-sanctioned and controlled while incantations and charms were not. 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

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