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

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

1 " We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

2 " Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

3 " WITCHES LIVED AND WERE BURNED LONG BEFORE the development of modern medical technology. The great majority of them were lay healers serving the peasant population, and their suppression marks one of the opening struggles in the history of man’s suppression of women as healers. The other side of the suppression of witches as healers was the creation of a new male medical profession, under the protection and patronage of the ruling classes. This new European medical profession played an important role in the witch hunts, supporting the witches’ persecutors with “medical” reasoning: "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

4 " Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

5 " So great was the witches’ knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the “father of modern medicine,” burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he “had learned from the Sorceress all he knew. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

6 " There is no historically consistent justification for the exclusion of women from healing roles. Witches were attacked for being pragmatic, empirical and immoral. But in the 19th century the rhetoric reversed: Women became too unscientific, delicate and sentimental. The stereotypes change to suit male convenience— we don't, and there is nothing in our "innate feminine nature" to justify our present subservience. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

7 " The real issue was control: male upper-class healing under the auspices of the Church was acceptable, female healing as part of a peasant subculture was not. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

8 " 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. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

9 " 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. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

10 " Their first target was not the peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed for the same urban clientele as that of the university-trained doctors. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

11 " If a woman dare to cure without having studied she is a witch and must die. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

12 " Witches represented a political, religious, and sexual threat to the Protestant and Catholic churches alike, as well as to the State. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

13 " the witch craze did not arise spontaneously in the peasantry. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

14 " It was a calculated ruling class campaign of terrorization. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers