The team of researchers at Edinburgh Napier University has won funding from the RCN Foundation to investigate more than 100 folk healers and midwives who are listed on the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft online database. The campaign seeks posthumous justice – a pardon for those convicted of witchcraft, an apology for all those accused, and a national memorial dedicated to their memory. Today, however, health care is the property of male professionals. Ninety-three percent of the doctors in the US are men; and almost all the top directors and administrators of health institutions. Women are still in the overall majority – 70 percent of health workers are women – but we have been incorporated as workers into an industry where the bosses are men. We are no longer independent practitioners, known by our own names, for our own work. We are, for the most part, institutional fixtures, filling faceless job slots: clerk, dietary aide, technician, maid. The age of witch-hunting spanned more than four centuries (from the 14th to the 17th century) in its sweep from Germany to England. It was born in feudalism and lasted – gaining in virulence – well into the “age of reason.” The witch-craze took different forms at different times and places, 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. The rare woman who did make it into a “regular” medical school faced one sexist hurdle after another. First there was the continuous harassment – often lewd – by the male students. There were professors who wouldn’t discuss anatomy with a lady present. There were textbooks like a well-known 1848 obstetrical text which stated, “She [Woman] has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love.” There were respectable gynecological theories of the injurious effects of intellectual activity on the female reproductive organs.

Witches, Midwives, And Nurses - Booktopia Witches, Midwives, And Nurses - Booktopia

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. Professor Nicola Ring’s new research into the Scottish healers and midwives accused of witchcraft 400 years ago reveals secrets about the origins of nursing 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.” Dr Nicola Ring, Nessa McHugh and Rachel Davidson-Welch, from the nursing and midwifery subject groups in the university’s school of health and social care, will look at the stories of these nurses and midwives and reflect on their practices from today's healthcare perspective. The “regulars” were still in no condition to make another bid for medical monopoly. For one thing, they still couldn’t claim to have any uniquely effective methods or special body of knowledge. Besides, an occupational group doesn’t gain a professional monopoly on the basis of technical superiority alone. A recognized profession is not just a group of self-proclaimed experts; it is a group which has authority in the law to select its own members and regulate their practice, i.e., to monopolize a certain field without outside interference. How does a particular group gain full professional status? In the words of sociologist Elliot Freidson:The Church associated women with sex, and all pleasure in sex was condemned, because it could only come from the devil. Witches were supposed to have gotten pleasure from copulation with the devil (despite the icy-cold organ he was reputed to possess) and they in turn infected men. Lust in either man or wife, then, was blamed on the female. On the other hand, witches were accused of making men impotent and of causing their penises to disappear. As for female sexuality, witches were accused, in effect, of giving contraceptive aid and of performing abortions: Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.”

Witches, Midwives And Nurses: A History of Women Healers Witches, Midwives And Nurses: A History of Women Healers

But it was more than an occupation. It had become, at last, a profession. To be more precise, one particular group of healers, the “regular” doctors, was now the medical profession. Their victory was not based on any skills of their own: The run-of-the-mill “regular” doctor did not suddenly acquire a knowledge of medical science with the publication of the Flexner report. But he did acquire the mystique of science. So what if his own alma mater had been condemned in the Flexner report; wasn’t he a member of the AMA, and wasn’t it in the forefront of scientific reform? The doctor had become – thanks to some foreign scientists and eastern foundations – the “man of science”: beyond criticism, beyond regulation, very nearly beyond competition. Outlawing the Midwives

Most of those accused are thought to have been executed as witches, being strangled and then burned at the stake, leaving no body for burial. Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history. They were abortionists, nurses and counsellors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright. It was a political struggle, second, in that it was part of a class struggle. Women healers were people’s doctors, and their medicine was part of a people’s subculture. To this very day women’s medical practice has thrived in the midst of rebellious lower class movements which have struggled to be free from the established authorities. Male professionals, on the other hand, served the ruling class – both medically and politically. Their interests have been advanced by the universities, the philanthropic foundations and the law. They owe their victory – not so much to their own efforts – but to the intervention of the ruling class they served. We found examples of miscarriages of justice,” Nicola says. “Some cases were very harrowing. Many of those who were accused confessed, but it’s clear that their confessions were forced. Some of them were also accused of being in a demonic pact or seeing fairies, but if you hadn’t slept for several days, had been tortured, were in pain, had a wound infection, hadn’t been fed – it’s quite clear that would’ve contributed to why people said what they said. They didn’t deserve their fate.” Once male professionals had taken over healthcare, women were sidelined. Ehrenreich and English trace the development of the “female” profession of nursing. They argue that the strictly gendered division of doctors and nurses has served as a powerful reinforcement to sexist stereotypes about the natural roles and abilities of men and women. They note that the gendered division between the two professions remains in force to this day. Furthermore, the professionalization of medicine created a disconnect between healers and patients, which has enabled the rise of an exploitative, for-profit healthcare system.

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

direct, command, require and admonish that within the space of twelve days ... that they should reveal it unto us if anyone know, see or have heard that any person is reported to be a heretic or a witch, or if any is suspected especially of such practices as cause injury to men, cattle, or the fruits of the earth, to the loss of the State. Along the same lines, English physicians sent a petition to Parliament bewailing the “worthless and presumptuous women who usurped the profession” and asking the imposition of fines and “long imprisonment” on any woman who attempted to “use the practyse of Fisyk.” By the 14th century, the medical profession’s campaign against urban, educated women healers was virtually complete throughout Europe. Male doctors had won a clear monopoly over the practice of medicine among the upper classes (except for obstetrics, which remained the province of female midwives even among the upper classes for another three centuries.) They were ready to take on a key role in the elimination of the great mass of female healers – the “witches.” 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. Our oppression as women health workers today is inextricably linked to our oppression as women. Nursing, our predominate role in the health system, is simply a workplace extension of our roles as wife and mother. The nurse is socialized to believe that rebellion violates not only her “professionalism,” but her very femininity. This means that the male medical elite has a very special stake in the maintenance of sexism in the society at large: Doctors are the bosses in an industry where the workers are primarily women. Sexism in the society at large insures that the female majority of the health workforce are “good” workers – docile and passive. Take away sexism and you take away one of the mainstays of the health hierarchy. Their first target was not the peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed for the same urban clientele as that of the university-trained doctors.”Being nurses and midwives, Nicola and her colleagues were able to spot hints of modern nursing and midwifery practice, which researchers from other disciplines might have missed. For example, mentions of dressings, and the importance of cleaning and washing patients and their clothes. 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. The question is not so much how women got “left out” of medicine and left with nursing, but how did these categories arise at all? To put it another way: How did one particular set of healers, who happened to be male, white and middle class, manage to oust all the competing folk healers, midwives and other practitioners who had dominated the American medical scene in the early 1800s? Above:A witch holding a plant in one hand and a fan in the other. Woodcut, ca. 1700-1720. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark 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.