The team of researchers at Edinburgh Napier University has won funding from the RCN Foundation to investigate more than 100 folk healers and midwives who are listed on the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft online database. If nursing was not exactly an attractive field to women workers, it was a wide open arena for women reformers. To reform hospital care, you had to reform nursing, and to make nursing acceptable to doctors and to women of “good character,” it had to be given a completely new image. Florence Nightingale got her chance in the battle-front hospitals of the Crimean War, where she replaced the old camp-follower “nurses” with a bevy of disciplined, sober, middle-aged ladies. Dorothea Dix, an American hospital reformer, introduced the new breed of nurses in the Union hospitals of the Civil War. But the real answer is not in this made-up drama of science versus ignorance and superstition. It’s part of the 19th century’s long story of class and sex struggles for power in all areas of life. The Church associated women with sex, and all pleasure in sex was condemned, because it could only come from the devil. Witches were supposed to have gotten pleasure from copulation with the devil (despite the icy-cold organ he was reputed to possess) and they in turn infected men. Lust in either man or wife, then, was blamed on the female. On the other hand, witches were accused of making men impotent and of causing their penises to disappear. As for female sexuality, witches were accused, in effect, of giving contraceptive aid and of performing abortions:

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

The virulence of the American sexist opposition to women in medicine has no parallel in Europe. This is probably because: First, fewer European women were aspiring to medical careers at this time. Second, feminist movements were nowhere as strong as in the US, and here the male doctors rightly associated the entrance of women into medicine with organized feminism. And, third, the European medical profession was already more firmly established and hence less afraid of competition. We have our own moment of history to work out, our own struggles. What can we learn from the past that will help us – in a Women’s Health Movement – today? These are some of our conclusions: First, consider the charge of sexual crimes. The medieval Catholic Church elevated sexism to a point of principle: The Malleus declares, “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” The misogyny of the Church, if not proved by the witch-craze itself, is demonstrated by its teaching that in intercourse the male deposits in the female a homunculus, or “little person,” complete with soul, which is simply housed in the womb for nine months, without acquiring any attributes of the mother. The homunculus is not really safe, however, until it reaches male hands again, when a priest baptises it, ensuring the salvation of its immortal soul. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1973) is a feminist polemical pamphlet by American writers Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. It argues that medical practice was the preserve of women healers until the Enlightenment era saw a hostile takeover by male professionals whose methods were—at least initially—less successful than those of the women they displaced. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, regarded as a seminal text of second wave feminism, established the public profiles of Ehrenreich and English. It was republished in 2010 with a new introduction by the authors.

But the Nightingale nurse was not just the projection of upper class ladyhood onto the working world: She embodied the very spirit of femininity as defined by sexist Victorian society – she was Woman. The inventors of nursing saw it as a natural vocation for women, second only to motherhood. When a group of English nurses proposed that nursing model itself after the medical profession, with exams and licensing, Nightingale responded that “... nurses cannot be registered and examined any more than mothers.” [Emphasis added.] Or, as one historian of nursing put it, nearly a century later, “Woman is an instinctive nurse taught by Mother Nature.” (Victor Robinson, MD. White Caps, The Story of Nursing) If women were instinctive nurses, they were not, in the Nightingale view, instinctive doctors. She wrote of the few female physicians of her time: “They have only tried to be men, and they have succeeded only in being third-rate men.” Indeed, as the number of nursing students rose in the late 19th century, the number of female medical students began to decline. Woman had found her place in the health system. It was a political struggle, second, in that it was part of a class struggle. Women healers were people’s doctors, and their medicine was part of a people’s subculture. To this very day women’s medical practice has thrived in the midst of rebellious lower class movements which have struggled to be free from the established authorities. Male professionals, on the other hand, served the ruling class – both medically and politically. Their interests have been advanced by the universities, the philanthropic foundations and the law. They owe their victory – not so much to their own efforts – but to the intervention of the ruling class they served. the witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy, and childbirth—whether through medications or charms.” Researchers are to investigate the folk-healer nurses and midwives in early modern Scotland who were accused of – and often executed for – the crime of witchcraft.

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

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable...Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils...it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft...And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime ... We learned this much: That the suppression of women health workers and the rise to dominance of male professionals was not a “natural” process, resulting automatically from changes in medical science, nor was it the result of women’s failure to take on healing work. It was an active takeover by male professionals. And it was not science that enabled men to win out: The critical battles took place long before the development of modern scientific technology. Above:Three witches with a cat, a dog and a bird. Engraving, ca. 1800, after a woodcut, 1619. Wellcome Collection. People were accused of being witches for many reasons- some were mentally ill, some had land and money others wanted.

Sometimes specific things they were using still apply, sometimes it was the principles of what they were doing that still resonate,” Nicola says. “Some of the women accused were also being assertive, standing up for themselves or their families. Others did not conform to social norms. Seeing all this, it’s fair to say that being accused as witches would’ve been the fate of myself, Rachel and Nessa.”

Witches, Midwives, And Nurses (2nd Ed.): A History of Women Witches, Midwives, And Nurses (2nd Ed.): A History of Women

Witches represented a political, religious, and sexual threat to the Protestant and Catholic churches alike, as well as to the State.” So while some women were professionalizing women’s domestic roles, others were “domesticizing” professional roles, like nursing, teaching and, later, social work. For the woman who chose to express her feminine drives outside of the home, these occupations were presented as simple extensions of women’s “natural” domestic role. Conversely the woman who remained at home was encouraged to see herself as a kind of nurse, teacher and counsellor practicing within the limits of the family. And so the middle class feminists of the late 1800s dissolved away some of the harsher contradictions of sexism. The Doctor Needs a NurseWe found examples of miscarriages of justice,” Nicola says. “Some cases were very harrowing. Many of those who were accused confessed, but it’s clear that their confessions were forced. Some of them were also accused of being in a demonic pact or seeing fairies, but if you hadn’t slept for several days, had been tortured, were in pain, had a wound infection, hadn’t been fed – it’s quite clear that would’ve contributed to why people said what they said. They didn’t deserve their fate.” The group of American medical practitioners that the foundations chose to put their money behind was, naturally enough, the scientific elite of the “regular” doctors. (Many of these men were themselves ruling class, and all were urbane, university-trained gentlemen.) Starting in 1903, foundation money began to pour into medical schools by the millions. The conditions were clear: Conform to the Johns Hopkins model or close. 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. Their scope alone suggests that the witch hunts represent a deep-seated social phenomenon which goes far beyond the history of medicine. In locale and timing, the most virulent witch hunts were associated with periods of great social upheaval shaking feudalism at its roots – mass peasant uprisings and conspiracies, the beginnings of capitalism, and the rise of Protestantism. There is fragmentary evidence – which feminists ought to follow up – suggesting that in some areas witchcraft represented a female-led peasant rebellion. Here we can’t attempt to explore the historical context of the witch hunts in any depth. But we do have to get beyond some common myths about the witch-craze – myths which rob the “witch” of any dignity and put the blame on her and the peasants she served. Our oppression as women health workers today is inextricably linked to our oppression as women. Nursing, our predominate role in the health system, is simply a workplace extension of our roles as wife and mother. The nurse is socialized to believe that rebellion violates not only her “professionalism,” but her very femininity. This means that the male medical elite has a very special stake in the maintenance of sexism in the society at large: Doctors are the bosses in an industry where the workers are primarily women. Sexism in the society at large insures that the female majority of the health workforce are “good” workers – docile and passive. Take away sexism and you take away one of the mainstays of the health hierarchy.

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

Above: Witchcraft: a bewitched woman vomiting. Woodcut, 1720. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark This pamphlet represents a beginning of the research which will have to be done to recapture our history as health workers. It is a fragmentary account, assembled from sources which were usually sketchy and often biased, by women who are in no sense “professional” historians. We confined ourselves to western history, since the institutions we confront today are the products of western civilization. We are far from being able to present a complete chronological history. Instead, we looked at two separate, important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe, and the rise of the male medical profession in 19th century America. Miss Hampton has been most successful in getting probationers [students] of the upper class; but unfortunately, she selects them altogether for their good looks and the House staff is by this time in a sad state. 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.”

Do you have any ancestors who were accused of witchcraft? Search the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft to find out.