Manual Witchcraft: Knowledge of the Middle Ages

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The now all-too-familiar figure of the 'witch' – that frightening old hag with warts on In the Middle Ages, the practice of magic was not yet imagined to be to practise the craft would need a good working knowledge of Latin.
Table of contents

In frontier America these doctors had to combat, not only the routine problems of sickness and death, but the abuses of a host of lay practitioners — usually depicted as women, ex-slaves, Indians and drunken patent medicine salesmen. But the real answer is not in this made-up drama of science versus ignorance and superstition.

The set of healers who became the medical profession was distinguished not so much by its associations with modern science as by its associations with the emerging American business establishment. With all due respect to Pasteur, Koch and the other great European medical researchers of the 19th century, it was the Carnegies and Rockefellers who intervened to secure the final victory of the American medical profession. The US in could hardly have been a more unpromising environment for the development of a medical profession, or any profession, for that matter.

Few formally trained physicians had emigrated here from Europe. There were very few schools of medicine in America and very few institutions of higher learning altogether. But in America, medical practice was traditionally open to anyone who could demonstrate healing skills — regardless of formal training, race or sex.

Women frequently went into joint practices with their husbands: The husband handling the surgery, the wife the midwifery and gynecology, and everything else shared. Or a woman might go into practice after developing skills through caring for family members or through an apprenticeship with a relative or other established healer.

Only later did she undertake formal training. In the early s there was also a growing number of formally trained doctors who took great pains to distinguish themselves from the host of lay practitioners.

Medieval Witchcraft, Religion and Pagan Beliefs

Not that serious academic training would have helped much anyway — there was no body of medical science to be trained in. The European medical profession had little better to offer at this time either. In the judgment of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. It was a premature move. There was no popular support for the idea of medical professionalism, much less for the particular set of healers who claimed it. And there was no way to enforce the new laws: The trusted healers of the common people could not be just legislated out of practice.

The Popular Health Movement of the s and 40s is usually dismissed in conventional medical histories as the high-tide of quackery and medical cultism. In reality it was the medical front of a general social upheaval stirred up by feminist and working class movements. Women were the backbone of the Popular Health Movement. The new sects set up their own medical schools, emphasizing preventive care and mild herbal cures , and started graduating their own doctors. In fact, leaders of both groups used the prevailing sex stereotypes to argue that women were even better equipped to be doctors than men.

However, he felt surgery and the care of males should be reserved for male practitioners. With tenfold more plausibility and reason we say it is the appropriate sphere for woman, and hers alone. For example, Harriet Hunt was denied admission to Harvard Medical College, and instead went to a sectarian school for her formal training. Actually, the Harvard faculty had voted to admit her — along with some black male students — but the students threatened to riot if they came.

Feminist researchers should really find out more about the Popular Health Movement. Put in the Popular Health Movement we see a coming together of feminist and working class energies. Is this because the Popular Health Movement naturally attracted dissidents of all kinds, or was there some deeper identity of purpose?

Today we tend to confine our critiques to the organization of medical care, and assume that the scientific substratum of medicine is unassailable. In , they pulled together their first national organization, pretentiously named the American Medical Association AMA. The attacks were linked: Women practitioners could be attacked because of their sectarian leanings; sects could be attacked because of their openness to women. The arguments against women doctors ranged from the paternalistic how could a respectable woman travel at night to a medical emergency?

In his presidential address to the AMA in , Dr. Alfred Stille, said:. Certain women seek to rival men in manly sports In doing so they may command a sort of admiration such as all monstrous productions inspire, especially when they aim towards a higher type than their own. 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. First there was the continuous harassment — often lewd — by the male students.

Having completed her academic work, the would-be woman doctor usually found the next steps blocked. The explanation, we suppose, was that the women who were likely to seek formal medical training at this time were middle class. The shift in allegiance was probably made all the easier by the fact that, in the cities, female lay practitioners were increasingly likely to be immigrants. Whatever the exact explanation, the result was that middle class women had given up the substantive attack on male medicine, and accepted the terms set by the emerging male medical profession.

A recognized profession is not just a group of self-proclaimed experts; it is a group which has authority in the law to select its own members and regulate their practice, i. How does a particular group gain full professional status?

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In the words of sociologist Elliot Freidson:. A profession attains and maintains its position by virtue of the protection and patronage of some elite segment of society which has been persuaded that there is some special value in its work. In other words, professions are the creation of a ruling class. French and especially German scientists brought forth the germ theory of disease which provided, for the first time in human history, a rational basis for disease prevention and therapy.

They returned to the US filled with reformist zeal.

Common Knowledge About The Middle Ages That Is Incorrect, Part 3: Witch Burnings

In German-trained doctors funded by local philanthropists set up the first American German-style medical school, Johns Hopkins. As far as curriculum was concerned, the big innovation at Hopkins was integrating lab work in basic science with expanded clinical training. Other reforms included hiring full time faculty, emphasizing research, and closely associating the medical school with a full university. Johns Hopkins also introduced the modern pattern of medical education — four years of medical school following four years of college — which of course barred most working class and poor people from the possibility of a medical education.

Meanwhile the US was emerging as the industrial leader of the world. Fortunes built on oil, coal and the ruthless exploitation of American workers were maturing into financial empires. For the first time in American history, there were sufficient concentrations of corporate wealth to allow for massive, organized philanthropy, i.

Foundations were created as the lasting instruments of this intervention — the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations appeared in the first decade of the 20th century. Many of these men were themselves ruling class, and all were urbane, university-trained gentlemen. Starting in , foundation money began to pour into medical schools by the millions.

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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. Flexner almost single-handedly decided which schools would get the money — and hence survive. For the bigger and better schools i. Their options were to close, or to remain open and face public denunciation in the report Flexner was preparing.

Instead, doors were slammed shut to blacks, to the majority of women and to poor white men. Medicine had become a white, male, middle class occupation. But it was more than an occupation.

European witchcraft

It had become, at last, a profession. But he did acquire the mystique of science. In , about 50 percent of all babies were delivered by midwives — most were blacks or working class immigrants. It was an intolerable situation to the newly emerging obstetrical specialty: For one thing, every poor woman who went to a midwife was one more case lost to academic teaching and research.

Publicly, however, the obstetricians launched their attacks on midwives in the name of science and reform. Both conditions were easily preventable by techniques well within the grasp of the least literate midwife hand-washing for puerperal sepsis, and eye drops for the ophthalmia. So the obvious solution for a truly public-spirited obstetrical profession would have been to make the appropriate preventive techniques known and available to the mass of midwives. This is in fact what happened in England, Germany and most other European nations: Midwifery was upgraded through training to become an established, independent occupation.

But the American obstetricians had no real commitment to improved obstetrical care. In fact, a study by Johns Hopkins professor in indicated that most American doctors were less competent than the midwives. Not only were the doctors themselves unreliable about preventing sepsis and ophthalmia but they also tended to be too ready to use surgical techniques which endangered mother or child. If anyone, then, deserved a legal monopoly on obstetrical care, it was the midwives, not the MDs. Under intense pressure from the medical profession, state after state passed laws outlawing midwifery and restricting the practice of obstetrics to doctors.

For poor and working class women, this actually meant worse — or no — obstetrical care. For instance, a study of infant mortality rates in Washington showed an increase in infant mortality in the years immediately following the passage of the law forbidding midwifery.

For the new, male medical profession, the ban on midwives meant one less source of competition. Women had been routed from their last foothold as independent practitioners. The only remaining occupation for women in health was nursing. Nursing had not always existed as a paid occupation — it had to be invented.

There were hospitals, and they did employ nurses. But the hospitals of the time served largely as refuges for the dying poor, with only token care provided. Hospital nurses, history has it, were a disreputable lot, prone to drunkenness, prostitution and thievery. And conditions in the hospitals were often scandalous.