Witches, Midwives, and Nurses
A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
I read this essay a year ago for the first time. I just remembered it as part of a conversation and figured it was worth doing a post for. A 1970s era history of medicine before the the profession became one of University trained (still mostly male even in 2022) medical doctors. I remember thinking that it held up well despite the now 50 years since it was written.
The paperback (image) is 108 pages so must be a little more detailed.
“Introduction
(+ ANNEXE : MALLEUS MALEFICARUM).
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.
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.”
Full essay is here;
After reading comments on witchcraft I must note that these 2020-22 years are most reminiscent of what the social climate must have been like during the Salem Witch Trials and before that the European Witch Trials. There is a disturbing trend toward mass hysteria and trending psychopathology in common.
Must Barbara Ehrenreich be so anti-male? Granted, he favored calomel, but Benjamin Rush (male AFAIK) also attempted to include freedom of medicine in the Bill of Rights. Has the war of the sexes no better alternative?