Forgotten Women: Witches, Healers and Medicine Women

Chicken soup for the 16th-century soul? Well, kind of. If your chicken soup has snails or mole blood in it.

The fact is, many of what we now term homeopathic healers, were women back in the day -- the "day" being early modern history, for instance. But because women largely shared their knowledge with each other, their expertise and acumen missed out on getting a prominent place in the historical record -- or a place at all.

A dusting off of centuries-old documents points the spotlight in their direction.

This was the focus of Beyond Home Remedy: Women, Medicine, and Science -- a fascinating exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library that was the brainchild of Rebecca Laroche, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Like our amorphous group of knitters' quiet contribution to history, these "Forgotten Women" formed the spine of medical and medicinal knowledge. Women as caretakers, in charge of the care and feeding of their families, meant that the kitchen often became the lab. Concocting cures naturally evolved into distilling tinctures and other scientific explorations in the healing arts.

This has a contemporary resonance in projects like Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, which encourages a return to getting our nutrition from food, as well as the ever-increasing interest in alternative medicine. In the 1500s though, "alternative" was the norm. "We've gotten so far away from our own healthcare," Laroche says ruefully. "We're so dependent on the medical establishment."

Another contemporary parallel: The rich could afford to go to a physician (although, as you'll see in the slideshow, that wasn't always the best care), but the poor went to the wise woman of the community. And lo! fears about witchcraft began to be exploited more for political than religious reasons.

Author of "Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts, 1550-1650", Laroche is also passionate about putting women back onto the scientific map. "As feminists, we're so bent on women having a presence in the scientific landscape now, but we have a place in science already," she says. "The idea that we don't is a fallacy."

Showing our presence in the past changes our relationship to the future, she says. I couldn't agree more.

Who's a witch, a wisewoman, a healer? See the slideshow:

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Three Witches

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"Double, double toil and trouble..." Trouble indeed. Women healers charged with witchery had more to do with their socio-economic status. But a wisewoman's healing practice didn't differ that much from that of upper-class medicine women. The recipe that Macbeth's witches incant is astonishingly accurate, Laroche says. The double toil may refer to how long it took to make these healing waters-- often days! See the Snail Water in slide 4.

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"Double, double toil and trouble..." Trouble indeed. Women healers charged with witchery had more to do with their socio-economic status. But a wisewoman's healing practice didn't differ that much from that of upper-class medicine women. The recipe that Macbeth's witches incant is astonishingly accurate, Laroche says. The double toil may refer to how long it took to make these healing waters-- often days! See the Snail Water in slide 4.

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* * * * * Check out more Forgotten Women. For more on women then and now, see Gerit Quealy's columns on StyleGoesStrong.com

All images by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC.

 

Follow Gerit Quealy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/historychiq

Comments

[Sassydays]

10:39 AM on 06/01/2011

Ironically the smear campaign against midwives gained the support of feminists who actually thought the medicalization of childbirth was a sign of their power and independence. Little did they know they were basically handing it over to the doctors who were all men at the time and now we are approaching a 40% cesarean rate and a country full of women who fear what their bodies were designed to do.

[Gerit Quealy]

10:54 AM on 05/21/2011

Today in 1881, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Just sayin' ; ) ( Hat tip Writer's Almanac)

[jon tatelman]

01:56 PM on 05/19/2011

Very interesting article!!!!

[KatieKon]

08:09 AM on 05/18/2011

Well, this is beyond fascinating and making me wish the exhibit were here in NYC so I could see it in person. Please give us more like this, Ms. Quealy. For women to get the recognition they deserve, we need scholars like you out there discovering and then reporting and writers like you to report with such detail and engagement.

[SueBoyle]

01:15 AM on 05/18/2011

Homeopaths do not "prey" upon anyone, nor do they need to. People usually come to homeopathy because conventional medicine fails them, or because they wish to avoid the chemicals and their side effects that pass for drugs at this time. Unfortunately the wise women of the past had little homeopathic knowledge, they were herbalists. Homeopathy was in the hands of male MD's until Hering wrote a book which allowed women going West to settle the frontier to become their family homeopath. A good book and remedy kit, what more do you need ?

[Virginia Hammer]

11:12 PM on 05/17/2011

As always, what a fascinating, well-researched, timely article by the estimable Gerit Quealy. Couldn't be more apt, given the distressing, dysfunctional state of 21st C ([Americanized, bueaucrazy'ed] medicine. Brava, Ms. Q and Brave, Women of Weal.
- Virginia Hammer and Midlantic Theatre Co., Newark

[kreifel]

07:57 PM on 05/17/2011

I'm always a little suspicious of attempts to re-examine history with an eye toward expanding the role of one group or the other -- even more so when that role is equated with some sort of "lost wisdom". In the case of women, the overwhelming majority of the primary materials we have available were written by and for men; so much so that a great deal critical interpretation is needed to make the jump from what the sources say to what the author(s) hope they meant. In this case I would rather simply admit that patriarchy was wrong and go on from there, allowing wisdom to grow out of the addition of quite a large infusion of new knowledge. That being said, I think shamanistic studies have yet to scratch the surface of the possible. Therefore, I hope to see more exhibitions like this in the future.

[MrsBs Confessions]

04:30 PM on 05/17/2011

And we are still here, mixing our herbs, brewing our tinctures and caring for our communities. And way too often, still getting persecuted for it.

[Martha Gelnaw]

03:26 PM on 05/17/2011

Thanks from someone who has used homeopathy, midwives, kineseology - all delivered by women. I eat organic and use essential oils remedies rather than alopathic medical practices and pharmceuticals. Thanks to those women healers before me that created natural healing by being close to the earth and its rhythms.

[AJW1976]

07:20 PM on 05/17/2011

Are you aware of the naturalistic fallacy? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy Simply because something is "natural" does not make it more or less healthy.

Unfortunately, it does appear that homeopaths and practitioners of other dubious treatments disproportionately prey upon women.

[sharynwolf]

12:22 PM on 05/17/2011

Great Piece