Witches, Midwives, and Nurses

• "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses" explores the historical suppression of women healers and the rise of male dominance in medicine.

Introduction

• Women have historically been healers, acting as unlicensed doctors, anatomists, abortionists, nurses, counselors, and pharmacists.
• They traveled as midwives and passed down medical knowledge.
• Women were called "wise women" but medicine is now largely a male profession with 93% of US doctors being men.
• The majority (70%) of health workers are women, but they are incorporated as workers in an industry dominated by men, often filling low-level positions.
• Nurses are subservient to doctors and taught not to question their authority.
• Women are often told they are biologically suited for nursing, not being doctors
• The suppression of women in medicine and the rise of male professionals was not a natural process, but an active takeover, not based on science.
• The stakes of this struggle included political and economic control of medicine.
• The suppression of female healers was a political and class struggle, where women healers were attacked for their gender and as part of a people's subculture.
• Female medical practice has thrived in revolutionary and lower-class movements.
• Male professionals served the ruling class and benefited from institutions like universities.
• This pamphlet examines the suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in 19th century America.

Witchcraft and Medicine in the Middle Ages

• Witches, primarily lay healers for peasants, were suppressed, marking a struggle in the suppression of women healers.
• The suppression of witches led to the creation of a new male medical profession under the ruling classes.
• The European medical profession supported witch hunts with "medical" reasoning.
• Witch hunts left a lasting negative association with women, especially the midwife and women healers.
• The exclusion of women from independent healing roles was a warning.
• Today's women's health movement has roots in medieval covens, while their ancestors were ruthlessly eliminated as witches.

The Witch Craze

• The age of witch-hunting spanned from the 14th-17th centuries, in Germany and England.

• Born in feudalism, it was a ruling class campaign of terror against the female peasant population.

• Witches were viewed as a political, religious, and sexual threat by Protestant and Catholic churches.

• Executions, mainly live burnings, occurred in Germany, Italy, and other countries, with the terror spreading to France and England.

• An average of 600 executions occurred in German cities annually.

• Women made up 85% of those who were executed, including old women, young women, and children.

• Witch hunts represent a deep-seated social phenomenon tied to mass peasant uprisings, capitalism, and Protestantism.

• Witchcraft may have been a female-led peasant rebellion in some areas.

• Witches' stories were recorded by the educated elite, meaning they are known only through the eyes of their persecutors.

• Medical interpretations attribute the witch craze to mass hysteria or insanity.

• The witch craze was not a lynching party nor mass suicide, rather a well-ordered legalistic procedure.

• Conducted by the Church and State, both Catholic and Protestant witch-hunters followed the Malleus Maleficarum.

• Initiating a witch trial involved posting a notice to reveal potential heretics or witches, with failure to report resulting in excommunication and punishments.

• Accused witches would be tried and tortured.

• Torture included stripping naked, shaving body hair, thumbscrews, the rack, spikes, bone-crushing "boots," starvation, and beatings.

• The witch-craze was a calculated ruling class campaign of terrorization.

The Crimes of the Witches

• Witches faced accusations covering political subversion, religious heresy, lewdness, and blasphemy.
• Central accusations involved sexual crimes against men, being organized, and having magical powers affecting health.
• Witches were accused of female sexuality.
• The medieval Catholic Church elevated sexism, considering a woman's independent thoughts as evil.
• The Church taught that intercourse resulted in the male depositing a homunculus in the female, requiring male baptism to ensure salvation.
• The Church condemned sex and pleasure, associating it with the devil.
• Witches were accused of getting pleasure from copulation with the devil, infecting men and causing impotence.
• Witches were accused of giving contraceptive aid and performing abortions.
• Witches were said to infect the venereal act/conception via seven methods.
• These include inclining men to passion, obstructing generative force, removing members accommodated to the act, by changing men into beasts, destroying the generative force in women, by procuring abortion, and by offering children to the devil.
• According to the Church, witches' power stemmed from their sexuality, beginning with intercourse with the devil confirmed at the witches' Sabbath.
• Witches promised to serve the devil and were confirmed at the witches' Sabbath where the devil was imagined as a goat.
• Witches were accused of being organized into secret societies, being more dreadful than those acting alone.
• The witch-hunting literature is obsessed with events that happened at the witches' Sabbaths, such as the eating of unbaptized babies, mass orgies and bestialism were speculated upon.
• Women accused of witchcraft met locally in small groups, sometimes gathering in crowds on festival days.
• Suggested the meetings were for pagan religious worship and trading herbal lore.
• The witch is accused of murdering and poisoning and sex crimes.
• Witches were healers, including "diviners, charmers, jugglers, all wizards, commonly called wise men and wise women".
• The association of the witch and the midwife was strong, but they might suffer, death.
• The Church had little to offer the suffering peasantry, who on sundays came crying for help, to only hear they had sinned.
• Kings and nobles had their court physicians who were men, while male upper class healing was acceptable, female healing as part of a peasant subculture was not.
• The Church viewed its attack on peasant healers as an attack on magic, with the devil believed to have power on earth.
• Magic charms were at least as effective as prayer in healing the sick.
• Magic cures were interference with the will of God and achieved with the help of the devil, making the cure evil.
• The wise woman/witch had remedies tested over years for use such as painkillers, anti-inflammatory and digestive aids.
• Witches used ergot for pain management during labor.
• Ergot derivatives are principal drugs used today to hasten labor and aid.
• Belladonna was used as an anti-spasmodic, used by the witch-healers to inhibit uterine contractions when miscarriage threatened.
• Digitalis is still an important drug in treating heart ailments is thought to have been discovered by an English Witch.
• The witch-healer's methods were as much of a threat as the results.
• The witch relies on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine; cause and effect, and is actively inquiring.
• She relies on her abilities to treat disease and childbirth, whether through medications of charms.
• Magic is viewed as the science of her time.

The Rise of the European Medical Profession

• Ruling classes cultivated secular healers, the university-trained physicians.
• European medicine was established as a secular science and profession in the 13th century.
• The medical profession actively eliminated female healers.
• From the 5th-13th century the Church's anti-medical stance stood in the way of medicine.
• The 13th century touched off by a revival by contact of the Arab world created medical schools.
• Universities, and more young men sought medical training.
• strict church controls only allowed the development of medicine according to their doctrine.
• Trained physicians were not permitted to practice without calling in a priest to aid their patient, who if refused, wouldn't be treated.
• The church would take pains to show that their attention to the body did not jeopardize the soul.
• Medical students spent years studying medical theory from Plato, Aristotle, and Christian theology, who had similar views.
• The student doctor rarely saw patients or did any experimentation.
• Surgery, or the dissection of bodies was almost unheard of.
• Confronted with a sick person, the university-trained physician had superstition and bleeding as a common practice.
• Medical theories were grounded more in "logic".
• There was a state of "science" at the time healers practiced "magic".
• In 1527 Paracelsus burned his text on pharmaceuticals because he had learned from the Sorcerous she knew.

The Suppression of Women Healers

• Medicine was made a profession requiring university training, which then allowed women to be barred from practice.
• Universities were closed to women, and licensing laws were enacted.
• The laws had to be selectively enforced, since there was only a handful of trained university doctors.
• The target wasn't peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed with the urban clientele of the university.
• The trial of woman was used to prove her the incompetet against physicians, but that as woman, she dared to cure at all.
• English physicians sent a petition to the Parliament to impose fines and imprisonment on any woman who attempted to study medicine.
• In the 14th century the campaigns against women was complete throughout Europe.
• Doctors had a clear monopoly of medicine among high class.
• Medicine and the church partnered in trials where if it was asked how to distinguish whether an illness is caused by witchcraft or some natural physical defect, by means of the judgement of doctors.
• In witch hunts, the Church legitimized doctor's professionalism, denouncing non-professional healing as heresy by stating that "If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die." (Of course, there wasn't any way for a woman to study.)
• It provided an excuse for doctors with any failings, which was the result of sorcery.
• The distinction between "female" superstition and "male" was made final.
• The witch trial placed the doctor as moral and intelletual, in the side of God and Law, a professional with magic.
• The doctors new status owed not ro medical achievements, but rather the church which he had served as part of a medical profession.
• Hunts only branded healters as possible malevolent