An audio installation at the Museum of the Home
The hidden history of women in medicine
- Researched, written, and produced by Dr Romany Reagan
- In partnership with
- With funding by
Project Introduction
Welcome to Women’s Weeds. This audio installation is a collection of 20 stories, covering 600 years, across four distinct themes exploring the feminist history of women in medicine.
This history is not about heroes or one or two stand-out women. Countless women did the work of healing within their families and sharing knowledge within their communities. These handed-down heritages of healing were part of oral traditions and not written down. The fragments that remain do not tell the whole story. We can grasp at snippets, but the real story is massive, complex, silent, ubiquitous.
The history of women in medicine is not truly a separate subject of analysis—it is the history of medicine itself.
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Main menu and map
Witchcraft
1. Introduction
To tell the story of women in medicine, and women’s contribution to scientific knowledge, I will first have to give a bit of context to who has the power to be heard and respected at any given time.
If some members of society are deemed untrustworthy—dare I say even Demonic—then those members of society lose all place and all ability to participate in community life with any agency.
I will begin by taking you back to mediaeval Europe. The four stories I share with you here in the herb garden tell the story of how women lived in fear and lost their agency during the late mediaeval era.
The time of the European witch trials.
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2. Invention of the Satanic Witch
The first European witch trials were for magick as heresy. In the 1350s, the Church sought and out and prosecuted learned sorcerers of text-based magicks. These were sorcerers accused of using demonic powers to achieve their own ends, but they controlled the demons they summoned, not the other way around.
Then in the 1420s, things began to change. It all started in the Pyrenees in 1424, in a mountain valley high in the Catalan range, where the local people believed there was a group among them who were following demons to go worship the Devil at night. This was an entirely new idea. These weren’t sorcerers controlling demons, these were people pledging fealty to demons—and not just any demon, the king Evil of them all: Satan. The Devil himself.
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3. Cunning Folk
Cunning-folk were local community practitioners of common magicks who would help you for a small fee by telling fortunes, identifying thieves, inducing love, healing the sick, and—most importantly—curing the bewitched.
Within healing practice, the cunning-folk approach was to use magical rituals and charms to break the spells that might be causing your ailment, often with herbal remedies. The most significant distinction between cunning practice and traditional physician medicine, as understood at that time, was its Anglo-Saxon origins. This is the story of the important place cunning-folk held in mediaeval and early modern rural communities.
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4. Magical Midwives
Women’s work as village healers and midwives, and their methods of healing through spells and potions, made them vulnerable to attacks from the emerging medical profession, the state, and the Church.
Women were supposed to endure the excruciating pain of childbirth as God’s punishment for Eve’s original sin. If suffering great pain in childbirth was considered part of being a good Christian woman, then helping with childbirth pain was seen as being in league with Satan. This is the story of who was persecuted—and and by whom—when doing the work of women’s reproductive care.
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5. Women Are Evil
What truly stands out when studying the witch trials are the stark demographics of the accused. In the continental European witch-hunts, over 80% of the victims killed as witches were women. And when we get to the Essex witch-hunts in England of the 16th and 17th century, that figure leaps to a staggering 92% who were women.
These numbers are overwhelming. And while there are many factors that contributed to this perfect storm of terror, these numbers tell us that it isn’t an option to ignore the role that gender played in these atrocities. This story delves into the evolving fears that gripped Western Europe during the 400-year horror that was the European witch hunts—and how the status of women in society fell dramatically as a result.
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Herbal Healers
1. Introduction
Women have had the authority to heal since ancient times. It was only after the founding of universities in Western Europe that medicine became a profession that required a university degree. But women were banned from attending university, so they were shut out of the medical establishment and confined to the lower levels of medical practice. During the changing times from the 16th to the 18th centuries, women still held many respected roles in healing. These are the stories of the herbal healers of the early modern era.
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2. Ancient Gynaecology
To understand the practice of Early Modern herbal healers, especially the practice of midwives, we must first learn the types of knowledge that circulated at this time by those who practised learned medicine.
The medicine learned in universities to train men of science was very different from the medicine learned through practice, the healing arts of herb women, midwives, and the family medicine of kitchen physick.
And what did men learn in these universities?
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3. Kitchen Physick
Nowadays, when we’re ill we go to the doctor. There are a group of established professionals who take care of our medical needs. But before the 18th century, your general practitioner wasn’t a separate place you went to or person you called, the primary place you would receive medical care was at home—and the person who gave it was the woman of the house.
Known as “Kitchen Physick”, home is where all healthcare began. Both preventative care, in the form of good eating habits and a healthy environment; along with curative care, in the making and administering of remedies.
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4. Herbal Books
By the 17th century, literate women had long been the authors of their own medical books in the home in the form of family herbals. But it’s during this time that we have women entering the area of publishing for the first time creating books for others to read. Early Modern women wrote books and pamphlets on medicines, treatments and therapies, chemicals and the impact of chemistry on medicine, and healthcare.
So what changed to offer these new opportunities?
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5. Herbal Midwives
Up until the 17th century, childbirth was women’s business, in fact it was so much so that part of the oath that a licensed midwife would swear in the 16th century included a promise that no men would be even allowed into the birthing room, unless due to great and urgent necessity.
Much of our information about what it was like giving birth in the early modern era comes from books and midwifery manuals, which share the perspective on what that author thought should happen, not what actual women were practising and living through. There is a wall of silence around practiced gynaecology.
The actual documented knowledge on midwifery and childbirth that we do have from the women working in the field comes from some rare precious diaries and other personal records. In this story, I share a glimpse into their sisterhood of secret practice.
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6. “Irregular Practitioners” in Town
Women and other non-university-trained practitioners were formally excluded from medicine, but they didn’t stop healing. The women who provided healing outside of the Royal College of Physicians and Royal College of Surgeons guilds were known as “Irregular Practitioners”.
We get this distinction of “Irregular Practitioners” from how these healers were recorded in medical establishment archives, but what does healing on the margins mean in actual practice?
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7. “Irregular Practitioners” in Hospitals
The “Irregular Practitioner” women who worked in hospitals did so alongside university-educated physicians and surgeons and their fellow female practitioners. These women routinely provided medical services within the hospital that might have made them vulnerable to prosecution if performed on the city’s streets.
Yet there is no evidence that any woman employed by a hospital was charged with a crime or brought before the College, Company, or city authorities. Which shows the fickle hypocrisy of challenging women’s abilities to heal.
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8. The Early Modern Right to Choose
*** Potentially distressing content warning ***
Today, scary laws and heated disagreements about abortion and a woman’s right to choose dominate our news headlines. Women’s fight to have control over our own bodies can feel like a modern war and that this is an issue unique to our current times. But it’s not. Not even close. Archaeological and field note evidence has shown that women have sought to regulate their fertility since ancient times. And the idea that this is a bad thing is surprisingly recent.
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Colonial Medicine
1. Introduction
Let’s make our way to the 1700s garden. Our next journey will be a difficult one. As we enter the 1700s garden we will delve into the darkness of 18th-century Colonial Medicine. It is here where we discover the Amerindian and African stories of the colonial West Indies.
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2. Indigenous Amerindian Story
We will begin our first story of Colonial Medicine with the first people who lived in the colonies—the indigenous Amerindian peoples.
Historians have found that the knowledge of remedies often came from female indigenous healers sharing what they knew with European male practitioners who had travelled to their lands. By reading between the lines of these texts written by European men, we can find an echo of their voice. There are hints of their agency in herbal healing and the transfer of medical knowledge in colonised regions. In this story, I will share what I’ve learned about the role of indigenous women healers in the West Indies.
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3. African Story
Because both the Amerindians and the Africans were enslaved together, the insufferable conditions of plantation work placed both groups in close cultural and intellectual contact throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. These networks formed for survival, food, and to share knowledge of cures within the society of the enslaved in which they all lived. The medical botany of the West Indies and surrounding colonies was shaped by the knowledge sharing of these two oppressed groups.
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4. Obeah Women of Jamaica
The importance of Obeah to both the enslaved and the free Maroon Africans of Jamaica can be seen in the multiple roles Obeah held within these communities. At once a religion, a herbal healing practice, and a rallying point for resistance, Obeah has been largely misunderstood by the Europeans who tried—without success—to suppress its power.
In this story, I will share with you what I have learned about the very misunderstood practice of Obeah in the West Indies, specifically in Jamaica; the role of women within the craft; and the place Obeah-women held within enslaved communities.
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5. The Peacock Flower
*** Graphic & distressing content warning ***
This is the story of the secret power of a simple plant: the Peacock Flower.
This plant has gone by many names: Barbados Pride, Red Bird of Paradise, Flower Fence, Paradise Flower, and even Flamboyant Tree. This plant enjoys prominent status as the national flower of Barbados, but many people don’t know the hidden story of what this plant meant to the Amerindian indigenous peoples, and later the Africans, of the West Indies.
The beautiful shrub dazzles with red and yellow flowers—but its stunning flowers and pretty names camouflage its real secret: used by those who know, the Peacock Flower plant induces abortion.
This is the most difficult story in Women’s Weeds. Here I will share the horrors endured by enslaved Africans and Amerindians in the West Indies—and to what lengths women went to prevent bringing children into this living hell.
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Victorian Feminists
1. Introduction
This is our final chapter in the history of women in medicine. Let’s leave the 1700s garden to walk to the Victorian and Edwardian botanical and cottage gardens. It is here where I’ll share the struggles and triumphs of Victorian women in their fight for scientific recognition and equal opportunities in education in the 19th century.
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2. An “Amusement for Ladies”
Many women embraced the scientific study of botany in the 18th century because it was something they had easy access to—both in domestic landscapes and botanical gardens. Botany was not seen as contrary to 18th-century views on femininity because it was seen as a ladylike study of plants and flowers, often done within the home, which was, after all, a woman’s natural domain.
But as we move into the 19th century, there was a deepening divide between the general amateur enthusiast and the scientific specialist. Between popular science and proper academic science. Between the “high” science of gentlemen in metropolitan learned societies and the “low” science of practitioners not admitted to these societies. The desire to define high and low science wasn’t only the urban learned gentleman against the rural self-taught rustic, but also, of course, between men of science and women of leisure.
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3. Education of Working Class Girls
Right up to the First World War, most girls in Britain received what was considered the important part of their education in the home. All women were expected to be domestic. However, what that domesticity looked like was different according to class.
An ordinary working-class Victorian wife was expected to run a household, keep financial ledgers, and often engage in paid work outside the home—all on top of the physical labour necessary to maintain the house and keep the children clean, fed, and safe. She was also the first responder to any and all medical needs. It was a lot of work.
The labour that working-class women provided—both waged from employment and unwaged in the home—was a massive and all-consuming endeavour. When would such a woman have time or the need for an education outside the home?
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4. Feminist Fight for Higher Education
A middle-class girl’s greatest vocation and aspiration in life was to secure a husband, and from there to become a mother. There were opportunities to become elementary school teachers, governesses, or nurses, but these occupations were perceived to be the sad last resort of the unattractive spinster.
To have an occupation was to have failed at the job of being a woman: which was to be a wife and mother. There was no need for a grammar school or university education for women. Those institutions were founded to prepare middle-class boys for service to the Church or State.
But this was about to change…
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5. Ideological Oddities & Theories Most Bizarre
From “tiny craniums” to “monthly stupidity”, this final story in Women’s Weeds is a bumpy ride through the stranger corners of 19th-century male scientific thought on women. Buckle up.
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Sources & Further Reading…
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Blackthorn & Stone 