The charges leveled against the “witches” included every misogynist fantasy harbored by the monks and priests who officiated over the witch hunts: witches copulated with the devil, rendered men impotent (generally by removing their penises—which the witches then imprisoned in nests or baskets), devoured newborn babies, poisoned livestock, etc. But again and again the “crimes” included what would now be recognized as legitimate medical acts—providing contraceptive measures, performing abortions, offering drugs to ease the pain of labor. In fact, in the peculiar legal theology of the witch hunters, healing, on the part of a woman, was itself a crime. As a leading English witch hunter put it:
For this must always be remembered, as a conclusion, that by Witches we understand not only those which kill and torment, but all Diviners, Charmers, Jugglers, all Wizards, commonly called wise men and wise women … and in the same number we reckon all good Witches, which do no hurt but good, which do not spoil and destroy, but save and deliver … It were a thousand times better for the land if all Witches, but especially the blessing Witch, might suffer death.2
The German monks Kramer and Sprenger, whose book Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, was the Catholic Church’s official text on witch-hunting for three centuries, denounced those “notoriously bad” witches, “such as use witch’s medicines and cure the bewitched by superstitious means.”3 They classed witches in “three degrees”: “For some both heal and harm; some harm, but cannot heal; and some seem only able to heal, that is, to take away injuries.”4 Kramer and Sprenger showed no sympathy for those who consulted the witch-healers:
For they who resort to such witches are thinking more of their bodily health than of God, and besides that, God cuts short their lives to punish them for taking into their own hands the vengeance for their wrongs.5
The inquisitors reserved their greatest wrath for the midwife, asserting:
The greatest injuries to the Faith as regards the heresy of witches are done by midwives; and this is made clearer than daylight itself by the confessions of some who were afterwards burned.6
In fact, the wise woman, or witch, as the authorities labeled her, did possess a host of remedies which had been tested in years of use. Liber Simplicis Medicinae, the compendium of natural healing methods written by St. Hildegarde of Bingen (A.D. 1098–1178) gives some idea of the scope of women healers’ knowledge in the early middle ages. Her book lists the healing properties of 213 varieties of plants and 55 trees, in addition to dozens of mineral and animal derivatives.7 Undoubtedly many of the witch-healers’ remedies were purely magical, such as the use of amulets and charms, but others were provably effective. They had painkillers, digestive aids, and anti-inflammatory agents. They used ergot, which is effective in inducing and speeding contractions, at a time when the Church held that labor was the Lord’s just punishment for Eve’s original sin. Belladonna, an antispasmodic, was used by the witch-healers to inhibit uterine contractions when miscarriage threatened. The use of digitalis as a cardiac stimulant is said to have been discovered by an English folk healer.
Meanwhile, the male, university-trained physicians, who practiced with the approval of the Church, had little to go on but guesswork and myth. Among wealthier people, medicine had achieved the status of a gentlemanly occupation well before it had any connection to science, or to empirical study of any kind. Medical students spent years studying Plato, Aristotle, and Christian theology. Their medical theory was largely restricted to the works of Galen, the ancient Roman physician who stressed the theory of “complexions” or “temperaments” of men, “wherefore the choleric are wrathful, the sanguine are kindly, the melancholy are envious,” and so on. Medical students rarely saw any patients at all, and no experimentation of any kind was taught. Medicine was sharply differentiated from surgery, which was almost everywhere considered a degrading, menial craft, and the dissection of bodies was almost unheard of.
Medical theories were often grounded more in “logic” than in observation: “Some foods brought on good humours, and others, evil humours. For example, nasturtium, mustard, and garlic produced reddish bile; lentils, cabbage and the meat of old goats and beeves begot black bile.” Bleeding was a common practice, even in the case of wounds. Leeches were applied according to the time, the hour, the air, and other similar considerations. Incantations and quasi-religious rituals mingled with the more “scientific” treatments inherited from ancient Greece and Rome. For example, the physician to Edward II, who held a bachelor’s degree in theology and a doctorate in medicine from Oxford, prescribed for toothache writing on the jaws of the patient, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” or touching a needle to a caterpillar and then to the tooth. A frequent treatment for leprosy was a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.
Such was the state of medical “science” at the time when witch-healers were persecuted for being practitioners of satanic 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 witches’ knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the “father of modern medicine,” burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he “had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.”8
Well before the witch hunts began, the male medical profession had attempted to eliminate the female healer. The object of these early conflicts 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. Take, for example, the case of Jacoba Felicie, brought to trial in 1322 by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, on charges of illegal practice. She was a literate woman and had received some unspecified “special training” in medicine. That her patients were well off is evident from the fact that (as they testified in court) they had consulted well-known university-trained physicians before turning to her. The primary accusations brought against her were that
… she would cure her patient of internal illness and wounds or of external abscesses. She would visit the sick assiduously and continue to examine the urine in the manner of physicians, feel the pulse, and touch the body and limbs.9
Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all.
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 fourteenth 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 an important role in the campaign against the great mass of female healers—the “witches.”
Physicians were asked to distinguish between those afflictions which had been caused by witchcraft and those caused by “some natural physical defect.” They were also asked to judge whether certain women were witches. Often the accused would be stripped and shaved and examined by doctors for “devil’s marks.” Through the witch hunts, the Church lent its authority to the doctor’s professionalism, denouncing non-professional healing as equivalent to heresy: “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 attend a university and go through the appropriate study.)
The witch trials established the male physician on a moral and int
ellectual plane vastly above the female healer. It placed him on the side of God and Law, a professional on par with lawyers and theologians, while it placed her on the side of darkness, evil, and magic. The witch hunts prefigured—with dramatic intensity—the clash between male doctors and female healers in nineteenth-century America.
The Conflict over Healing Comes to America
The European model of medicine as an elite occupation was not easy to transplant to the new world. University trained physicians did not emigrate to the colonies, and domestic medical education—or higher education of any kind—caught on only slowly. In general, medical practice was open to anyone who could demonstrate healing skills, regardless of formal training, race, or sex. The medical historian Joseph Kett reports that “one of the most respected medical men in late-eighteenth-century Windsor, Connecticut, for example, was a freed Negro called ‘Dr. Primus.’ In New Jersey, medical practice, except in extraordinary cases, was mainly in the hands of women as late as 1818.…”10 Medical care in rural areas was dominated by lay healers: “root and herb” doctors who relied on Indian remedies, “bonesetters,” and midwives.
The tradition of female lay healing flourished in colonial America and the early republic. Colonial women brought centuries’ worth of healing lore with them from the old countries, knowledge which they carefully revised and adapted to meet the conditions of the new land. For their knowledge of the available herbs, they depended ultimately on the Indians, who alone knew the healing powers of the native plants. The mixing of Indian, African, and European lore produced a rich new tradition of female healing—complex in its knowledge of the plants and the seasons, involving not only how to find or grow healing herbs, but how to pick and dry them, how to administer and mix them, or combine them with the use of steam, exercise, massage. Goldenseal powder or tea, and pennyroyal, still considered to be among the most potent herbal remedies, are otherwise known, respectively, as yellow Indian paint or Indian plant and “squaw mint.” Cayenne pepper, another legendary cure, is described by a fairly contemporary herbalist as originating among the “negroes of the West Indies.”11
The writer Sarah Orne Jewett sketched the female lay healer in the late nineteenth century in a story that even then rang with nostalgia. “This is most too dry a head,” says the aging healer Mrs. Goodsoe, rejecting a particular herb, and goes on:
There! I can tell you there’s win’rows o’ young doctors, bilin’ over with book-larnin’, that is truly ignorant of what to do for the sick, or how to p’int out those paths that well people foller toward sickness. Book-fools I call ’em, them young men, an’ some on ’em never’ll live to know much better, if they git to be Methuselahs. In my time every middle-aged woman who had brought up a family had some proper ideas of dealin’ with complaints. I won’t say but there was some fools amongst them, but I’d rather take my chances, unless they’d forsook herbs and gone to dealin’ with patent stuff. Now my mother really did sense the use of herbs and roots. I never see anybody that come up to her.…12
The North American female healer, unlike the European witch-healer, was not eliminated by violence. No Grand Inquisitors pursued her; flames did not destroy her stock of herbs or the knowledge of them.* The female healer in North America was defeated in a struggle which was, at bottom, economic. Medicine in the nineteenth century was being drawn into the marketplace, becoming—as were needles, or ribbons, or salt already—a thing to be bought and sold. Healing was female when it was a neighborly service, based in stable communities, where skills could be passed on for generations and where the healer knew her patients and their families. When the attempt to heal was detached from personal relationships to become a commodity and a source of wealth in itself—the business of healing became a male enterprise.
None of this took place automatically, though. In North America, the ouster of female healers took place over a century-long struggle which ebbed and flowed with the deeper social changes of the times. If the methods were not torture and execution, but repression and slander, they were, in the end, just as effective.
The chief opponents of the female healer, the men who were drawn, from the late seventeen hundreds on, by the possibility of medicine as a lucrative career, were hardly “professionals” in the genteel, European sense, but they were no less exclusive. The great majority of these “regular” doctors, as they called themselves, had been trained by apprenticeship to an older physician, who had probably been trained the same way himself. Others had taken a two- or three-year course of lectures at a medical school; still others mixed apprenticeship and classroom training. There were no formal standards to meet; one became a “regular” doctor essentially by meeting the approval of one’s preceptors (or preceptor, one was enough) among the existing “regular” doctors. The regulars were, then, a kind of club. Women could not join because no physician would take a woman as an apprentice and no school would admit one as a student.
Among the regulars was a small elite who had capped off their education with a few years of medical study in Great Britain and a “grand tour” of the Continent. There they had a tantalizing glimpse of medicine as an established and gentlemanly profession, an ideal that American medicine would aspire to for the rest of the century. This ideal, as it took form in the late eighteenth century, was based on the successful British physician. Not yet a man of science, he was however, beyond question, a gentleman. As with the medieval physicians before him, his classical education had not been sullied by too much practical training (though he had spent some years “reading” medicine, usually in Latin): he mingled only with the best people and he would perform no task which was unworthy of his rank,13 such as surgery or the concoction of drugs. To underline their gentlemanly status, London physicians sported enormous wigs and gold-headed canes, and “often bore themselves in a ridiculously stately manner, and spoke with absurd solemnity.”14
All this made an awesome impression on American students like young Benjamin Rush, who found that his status as a medical graduate gave him access to the cream of London and Parisian salon society.15 Men like Rush (who later distinguished himself as a physician in the revolutionary army) and his older contemporary John Morgan attempted to transplant the genteel model of the profession to Philadelphia. They urged that the British system of ranking physicians above surgeons and druggists be adopted in this country; Morgan hoped to restrict the title of physician to men who had had a full classical education before embarking on their medical training. The idea was that the physician should “soar above the sordid views of vulgar minds.”16
But at the heart of professional medicine there still lay a frightful theoretical void. Air and water were blamed by the medical men as bringers of disease, and people lived in dread of getting wet or being surprised by a breeze, thereby “catching cold.” Consequently bathing was considered a risky activity, and houses were unventilated and close, hung with heavy draperies to keep out sun and air, while women protected themselves with parasols and veils. Doctors considered water, air, and light especially injurious in disease, to the extent of keeping drinking water away from the ill.
Even the finest British or French medical education could tell an American doctor little that was useful or even accurate. It was known that the blood circulated, for example, but it was not known why or how.17 Medical theory still consisted largely of efforts to classify all known diseases—according to their symptoms—in order to discover “the Disease” which underlay all human ills. In Rush’s time, approximately two thousand diseases had been classified and Rush was able to announce in a lecture:
I have formerly said there was but one fever in the world. Be not startled, Gentlemen, follow me and I will say there is one disease in the world. The proximate cause of disease is irregular convulsive or wrong action in the system affected. This, Gentlemen, is a concise view of my theory of disease.…18
Rush, now considered the most outstanding physician of late-eighteenth-century America, was a man of boundless theoretica
l imagination. He once happened to observe a Negro whose skin had turned white in the course of some disease. Rush nimbly concluded that all Negroes were suffering from a disease which had turned them black, and that he had just witnessed a spontaneous “cure”!
Female lay healers did not have a rational theory of disease causation and therapy either, but then they did not make any claims to “book-larnin’.” What they had was experience—experience which had been discussed and revised for generations. To all accounts, a patient would have done better with an illiterate lay healer than with an expensive regular doctor who could write out prescriptions in Latin. Healers who had not studied at least knew enough to trust nature:
The existing situation was well stated by E. M’Dowell of Utica, Michigan. “In 1840, under a popular allopath [regular doctor], I was fast sinking under a fever. On a feather bed, windows and door closed on a hot summer day, pulse and breath nearly gone, I lay roasting. Friends stood around, ‘looking at me to die.’
“At this critical moment a woman called in to see me. She ordered both doors and windows thrown open, and with a pail of cold water and towel, she began to wash me. As the cold water towel went over me, I could feel the fever roll off and in less than five minutes I lay comfortable, pulse and breath regular, but weak, and soon got well”.19
The herbal brews the female healer might prescribe were, for the most part, gentle, and she knew when to draw back and wait out a difficult delivery or an obstinate fever. Knowing her patients as neighbors, she knew also the disappointments, the anxieties, and the overwork which could mimic illness or induce it. If she could not always cure, neither could she do much harm, and very often she was able to soothe. Apparently with her in mind, a Dr. Douglass observed ruefully in the mid-eighteenth century:
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 6
