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completely opened my eyes to the history of our broken healthcare system and the roots that it has in a gender/class struggle. some of the analysis of the nursing profession felt just a bit outdated, but other than that, this was brilliant.
(I read the zine version) I think this book gave a good brief understanding of the (American) system of institutionalized medicine, and how witches, midwives and nurses are the women healers and how they have been pushed into oblivion from the male-dominated medical industry. I feel like the dominant narrative of the western medical industry today hasn’t taught me or told me that witches and midwives and nurses actually knew how to heal people better than “pseudoscience” doctors that gave way to...
This was quite an interesting read for a non-feminist, 21st century medical student. From 1972, Barbara and Deirdre bring us an academic, synthesized approach to the History of female health professionals. It is quite obvious that women have always been the cornerstone of the medical arts, but for some obscure reason have never been regarded as so. In the dark ages, we called them witches, inferior to the rational knowledge of physicians and sought out feverishly, for even when their treatments
Is Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, first published in 1970, a bit dated? Yes. Does it contain an excellent history of how healing women (who once acted as midwives, yes, but as general healers as well) were first diminished by being deemed witches and then shunted into the supporting role of nurse? Yes, as well. This slim volume still makes for excellent reading, particularly to see how the Church and the emerging physicians’ associations made common cause in keeping wo...
There is a lot of information in this book but it's dry, making it seem like a chore to read it. Kinda sad, this is a fascinating topic. I borrowed this book from archive.org
An excellent jumping off point if you want to learn more about women in medicine from a feminist lens
This pamphlet obviously has some dated info. The statistics about male to female med school ratios are laughable in our time where numbers have largely equalized. Still, one of the main reasons I did not choose medical school as my own entry into healthcare is the ongoing if not out right patriarchy of medicine then at least its overbearing paternalism. I don’t think the answer necessarily will come from direct reform of the professional role of physician as much as it will come from the diversi...
Reading the history of women healers and the development of the medical profession was fascinating. However, I was surprised at the authors' conclusions on the nursing profession at present. The authors state, 'The drive to professionalize nursing is, at best, a flight from the reality of sexism in the health system.'...a completely absurd statement and a very outdated perspective. It is truly a profession that requires skill and intelligence, in addition to showing compassion and 'nurturing ten...
Books that look at the witch trials of Europe and beyond are always at risk of sharing bad information. There is so much misinformation, misunderstanding, and outright fabrications, surrounding the witch trials that I think it's impossible to ever unravel it all and get to the truth. Couple that with the lack of records anyway, we will never truly know what really happened. Nonetheless I find myself angry at any book that dares to suggest that large numbers of the women who were murdered as witc...
I adored this book, especially since the authors included a caveat at the beginning which attempted to neutralize any overly-vehement or one-sided arguments, "...we ... cringe a little at what read now like overstatements and overly militant ways of stating things." From what I've read of Ehrenreich's work, I wonder if more of her books wouldn't be better-served to have this type of warning in the introduction.Nevertheless, I was able to overlook what I thought were glaring omissions. For exampl...
The book depicted here is the 1972 first edition, main text and intro.The book I read is the 2010 second edition which has retained the same text but with 2 intros, the 1972 and the 2010. The writers judge the main text to present a succint and an accurate look at women as medical practitioners. However it seems that the writers Barabara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English needed to go back to update their intro to reflect their lower level anger/frustration and to update the professionalization of n...
I read this after seeing mention of it in a cool Lithub profile of the radical bookstore Firestorm Books in Asheville, NC, in which the owners mentioned it was their best-selling title in 2018. The owners compared it to a simpler version of Federici's "Caliban and the Witch," which I have been interested in reading, but which isn't available from either of the libraries I use regularly--so I checked this out from the library instead. It's quite short, more of a pamphlet than a book, really.I rea...
only a surface commentary of course, given that the book is just 112 pages long, but still an eye-opening, accessible and infuriating short history of what is now the medical profession and how it has excluded women completely for centuries through the cooperation among all dominant institutions and their sickening control over everything of consequence. “for centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from nei...
Ehrenreich writes an introduction for this reprint of a 1973 classic, and as she says...we have to remind ourselves that WMN was written in a blaze of anger and indignation.This book was contemporaneous with Our Bodies, Ourselves, the feminist text on the female body. It enlightened a generation of women who until then had taken elective hysterectomies and automatic mastectomies for granted, both money-making procedures for the mostly male doctors who populated the medical profession by design.
Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English traces the systematic and systemic persecution of women as healers beginning with the witch-hunt craze of the 14th through 17th centuries up to the early 20th Century. As Ehrenreich and English demonstrate, women have always been healers, primarily healers of women and the poor. But their journey has been fraught with peril. For over five centuries they faced a systematic, two-pronged attack on the...
From the perspective of a patient in the medical system today, I really enjoyed reading this and I would be really interested in reading some of the sources in the bibliography. I would be curious what today's nurses and women doctors think about some of the conclusions. I wonder how they hold up after 50 years.
I am a fan of Barbara Ehrenreich's work as well as a fan of midwifery, and so it was with great interest that I picked up this pamphlet. However, I naively expected it to go in depth into the history of midwifery and women healers. I was not anticipating that having been written two years before I was born, the over-riding feminist perspective and thesis of this work. I have never stopped to consider that the nursing profession is a way of oppressing women and keeping them locked into the mother...
I am a witch the obstetric system is a sham but we all knew this already
This book managed to piss me off with its shoddy scholarship. It read as one long thesis statement with little evidence to back it up. There were only 17 books in the bibliography for a pamphlet that was supposed to span Middle Ages to the 1970s. Objective language is thrown out the window and history is given a value-judgment without much struggle in arriving at that value-judgment. The historian, whether feminist or not, will cringe at some of the value-laden words used in this small pamphlet....
A quick read that summarizes things that I've heard/read/intuited/somehow learned before, with additional elaboration and actual dates and times - tells the story of the Goddess-worshipping women that the men of the Catholic Church were so afraid of, with their healing powers and lack of sexual shame - and how that battle between ideologies and genders has been carried through today. Amazingly timely, considering it was written quite a while ago - unfortunately. It shows the inherent unease in t...