It shows that many of the principles of what they were doing still apply within nursing today and has given us insight into the early history of our professions. The devil was believed to have real power on earth, and the use of that power by peasant women – whether for good or evil – was frightening to the Church and State. The emphasis was on preventive care, as opposed to the murderous “cures” practiced by the “regular” doctors. We have little evidence about the political significance of the witches’ organizations, but it’s hard to imagine that they weren’t connected to the peasant rebellions of the time. Thus magic cures, even when successful, were an accursed interference with the will of God, achieved with the help of the devil, and the cure itself was evil.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses Summary | SuperSummary Witches, Midwives, and Nurses Summary | SuperSummary

For eight long centuries, from the fifth to the thirteenth, the other-worldly, anti-medical stance of the Church had stood in the way of the development of medicine as a respectable profession. They focused their energies on the care of the sick because this was a “natural” and acceptable interest for ladies of their class.

From the perspective of our movement today, it’s probably more relevant than the women’s suffrage struggle. It was impossible to enforce the licensing laws consistently since there was only a handful of university-trained doctors compared to the great mass of lay healers. If the nurse was idealized Woman, the doctor was idealized Man – combining intellect and action, abstract theory and hard-headed pragmatism. There are some interesting people, both women and men, and often doctors were practising in a similar way to them at the time. At the same time, the number of hospitals began to increase to keep pace with the needs of medical education.

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

Harvard was one of the lucky winners, and its president could say smugly in 1907, “Gentlemen, the way to get endowments for medicine is to improve medical education. While the run-of-the-mill American doctor was still mumbling about “humors” and dosing people with calomel, a tiny medical elite was travelling to German universities to learn the new science. 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.Practical nurses are still taught to wear girdles, use make-up, and in general mimic the behavior of a “better” class of women.