Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (2nd Ed.): A History of Women Healers (Contemporary Classics)

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Their options were to close, or to remain open and face public denunciation in the report Flexner was preparing. Ergot derivatives are the principal drugs used today to hasten labor and aid in the recovery from childbirth. Ninety-three percent of the doctors in the US are men; and almost all the top directors and administrators of health institutions. 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. Second, as scientific knowledge improved, university-trained practitioners (that is, white male practitioners) began to enjoy a genuine advantage over untrained medics.

Doctor, Healer, Midwife, Witch: How the the Women’s - DIG Doctor, Healer, Midwife, Witch: How the the Women’s - DIG

Florence Nightingale and Louisa Schuyler (the moving force behind the creation of America’s first Nightingale-style nursing school) were genuine aristocrats. One of the earliest and highest items on their agenda was medical “reform,” the creation of a respectable, scientific American medical profession. In the late 1870s a committee investigating New York’s Bellevue Hospital could not find a bar of soap on the premises.Finally, the witch craze provided a handy excuse for the doctor’s failings in everyday practice: Anything he couldn’t cure was obviously the result of sorcery. Prior to the 19th century, there was no formal training in medicine available, and any competent person might serve as the caregiver for a frontier community. Fortunately for the medical profession, in the late 19th century the American public suddenly developed a healthy respect for the doctors’ scientific knowledge, outgrew its earlier faith in quacks, and granted the true medical profession a lasting monopoly of the healing arts. Ehrenreich and English argue that the witch hunts of the early modern era were, in part, a deliberate attempt to target the women healers who embodied a localized form of female authority. Or, conversely, they’d overseen a recovery, which was then used as evidence of a pact or association with the devil.

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

At worst, it is sexist itself, deepening the division among women health workers and bolstering a hierarchy controlled by men. At this point in our history, every effort to take hold of and share medical knowledge is a critical part of the struggle – know-your-body courses and literature, self-help projects, counselling, women’s free clinics. 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.Their “formal training” meant little even by European standards of the time: Medical programs varied in length from a few months to two years; many medical schools had no clinical facilities; high school diplomas were not required for admission to medical schools. This means to us that the sexism of the health system is not incidental, not just the reflection of the sexism of society in general or the sexism of individual doctors. Those accused of witchcraft were often subjected to sleep deprivation during the trial process and some would be examined by witch prickers – people paid to find the mark of the devil on accused witches by stabbing them with long needles. People were accused of witchcraft for many different reasons, but for some, actions taken to help care for sick neighbours or assist with childbirth would ultimately contribute to their downfall.

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

Today we tend to confine our critiques to the organization of medical care, and assume that the scientific substratum of medicine is unassailable. Female medical leaders such as Elizabeth Blackwell joined male “regulars” in demanding an end to lay midwifery and “a complete medical education” for all who practiced obstetrics.If she did finally make it into practice, she found her brother “regulars’’ unwilling to refer patients to her and absolutely opposed to her membership in their medical societies. The status of women healers has risen and fallen with the status of women When women healers were attacked, they were attacked as Women; when they fought back, they fought back in solidarity with all women. To get the message across, the Carnegie Corporation sent a staff man, Abraham Flexner, out on a national tour of medical schools – from Harvard right down to the last third-rate commercial schools. However, at the beginning of the century public universities were founded and began to train men—and only men—in medicine, who then used their educational status to discredit other medical practitioners.