Indo-European customs naturally saw women as healers. Women tended for the children, the elderly, the wounded and the sick. They were mid wives and "gynecologists." Traditionally, men were not interested in any of these roles. This system was casually handed down in an apprentice type system. Mothers taught daughters recipes for fighting typical diseases. These recipes often included "incantations", similar to prayers. A prayer would be assigned to every illness, along with a remedy, and documented in a book. Of course no testing was done, but healers who healed the sick when no one else could became famous. During the 11th and 12th centuries with the emergence of Universities, Latin translations of Ancient scientific texts in Arabic and Greek, the role of the healer was evolving into a "learned profession" in urban areas. With the Renaissance emerging many skilled workers found themselves in a controversy of fate. While scribes could learn to be printers and typesetters, women could not become literate in anatomy and Latin. Women could not be scientists.

Wealthy women who were willing to travel, who had supportive families, and daughters of doctors managed to acquire medical degrees. Many attended Universities but were not granted degrees, others who acquired degrees had to find a town where the laws allowed them to practice. During the 11th and 12th century both educated and uneducated Catholic women were honored for their special healing and nurturing abilities. These were nuns creating and practicing in institutions such as "Sisters of Mercy", they were adorned as Saints including, St. Elizabeth, St.Apolonia and St. Louise de Marillac. Germany and Italy had the most tolerant attitudes and laws toward learned female physicians, apothecarists and herbalists of Europe during the late middle ages. However, most women healers were still ignorant rural people who confused Pagan and Christian traditions and simply followed traditional skills passed down to them throughout centuries. This role could not die out easily as physicians were scarce and expensive.

However in 1486 two German Jesuit Priests wrote "Malleuf Maleficarum" the first doctrine banishing women from practicing medicine, naming their acts heresy and worshipers of evil. This text became the bible for hunting witches (or hunting women as 90% of the millions murdered are believed to be women). By the 16th century women were willing to aid the dying in war as well as the bubonic plague victims, while they were also being tortured and executed for midwifery, especially if they had lost a child during delivery. Whole villages were dying, not only healers and mid-wives, but often widows and single women. One German town was rumored to have only one woman left alive. Again only affluent women, or women of political influence (with sympathetic ties to their king, for instance) were able to survive and practice during this period. By the 17th century the male population had almost exclusively monopolized the medical profession with women dutifully and almost exclusively obeying the roll of learned nurse. Women who were able to practice (often unlicensed) were able to do so because of plague outbreaks and the expense and unavailability of male doctors. Mid wives continued, but were left to educate themselves on anatomy and apothecaries and were therefore often incompetent. They were flat out denied access to the University system and were then described as too "stupid and illiterate" to practice. Aiding comfort in medical practice was transferred from the mother to the doctor. Labor positions moved from alternating squatting positions, to lying flat comforting the doctor. Midwifery practices remedied the needs for the mother during labor with vaginal oils to loosen the canal for birth, as well as loosen the pain for the mother, these were combined with messages to do the same. Conversely 18th century medical practices said not to intervene or lessen the mothers pain because a mothers pain is God given pain and punishment of her original sin.

Misunderstanding of female anatomy, reproduction and basic medical needs took a turn for the worse during the population growths seen in 19th century Europe. With enormous birth rates, few doctors, few mid wives and even fewer knowledgeable people of any field, left basic gynecological needs largely unattended. The modesty of the Victorian woman along with their fear of male doctors resulted in most 19th century married women with chronic infections they lived with and passed onto their unborn children.1

"Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson opened a dispensary for women and children in Seymour Place, Marylebone, London, in 1866. It was opened during a cholera epidemic, and the local people were grateful for any medical attention, even if it did come from women. This was part of a movement alleviating the suffering of the urban poor. Working class families called in the doctor only in emergencies, as his fee was high. Standards of health were appaulling, and most women had ongoing uterine infections. Between sixty and ninety women came to the dispensary every afternoon, and in the five years after it opened the dispensary saw over 40,000 women." Between 1871-1872 the dispensary would raise funds to expand into a hospital where Elizabeth Garret-Anderson would perform surgery on needy women and children.

However, womans' bodies alone were not the only medical neglections, their surroundings were appauling. In the 1860's people were reminded to not throw their dead dogs and cats onto the streets, in New York overcrowding took the form of 250,000 people living in 15,000 tenement dwellings. While earlier in London, Dr. John Snow sited that cholera reproduced itself in the body of its victims, and their vomit and excremits, and most often found its' way to the water system and spread its' infection there. In Germany, England and specifically in New York "cholera might appear once in a generation to destroy thousands of lives, tuberculosis and pneumonia killed as many each year."2 In the US, especially New York, urban areas were abandoned by "decent folk" who felt the poverty conditions and overcrowding were a deserved place of diseases for people who lived by such poor hygene and morals, according to Prodestant newsletters, such as those printed by Methodists. Other epidemic diseases with no cure included typhoid, smallpox and syphilis. Some churches even bragged (marketed themselves) of being free of paupers, idlers, poor and the unhealthy. While typically in New York, a moral carpenter could live between a common theif and tuberculosis victim, and it was just as common for a churchgoing seamstress could live next door to prostatute. Even the strongest faithed rural youth was thought to be instantly corrupted by the intensity of urban vices, the contemporary sympathy believed anyone living so horribly would eventually ask for whiskey instead of milk. The New York Times reported that the cities problems were abandoned by all but women and children, and the Church of Rome was the only institution which remained, taking in the sick, the immoral and hardworking all the same. However the War seemed to have tainted American. After the Civil War had successfully kept the Union in tact, New Yorkers felt America was not immune to European problems of war and unrest. Protestant churches complained of a shift from America as a place of ideaism, to centering on practicality and commerce. Furthering this shift was the success of the newly formed NY Health Board, reducing the Choleric epidemic through disinfection and quarantine rather than the tradition of prayer and fasting. "God was still in his heaven, as most American would be quick to affirm. Yet the fact of his existence had ceased to be a central meaningful reality in their lives...America seemed well on the way toward becoming a land of 'practical atheists.'"2 The cholera epidemic of 1866 helped install and form the modern Health and Safety Boards governing our contemporary cities, sewages and disease.

Women's health issues may never know a full recovery from the misogyny of 1486 and the 500 year damage of the witch craze. However, while the medieval "tolerant" programs kept women students to a minimum by installing quotas, in 1970 Affirmative Action quotas, along with lawsuits brought on by the Women's Equity Action (and others), reversed that system by bringing to trial every medical school in the United States. These lawsuits lead to a sharp increase in the number of female medical students. Today female doctors are not unusual, but rather legal practitioners are (still) in high demand.

1. "Medicine Women: A History of Women Healers" by Elisabeth Brooke. Quest Books 1997.

2. "The Cholera Years" Charles E. Rosenberg, Unviserity of Chicago Press, 1987.