Wise women, old wives and passing gypsies: the hidden herstory of herbalism

Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, Avicenna, Paracelsus, Culpeper, Thomson. These are names impressed upon doctors, nurses and even CAM practitioners as the history of medicine is imparted to generations of aspiring healers. 

 

Yet approved texts such as Griggs’ ‘Green Pharmacy’ rarely elaborate on the contribution of women herbalists throughout history.

In most histories, if the contribution of women healers are referred to at all, it is in an off-hand way. We learn the full name, dates and background of each male figure, but for the most part, women are referred to dismissively:  “... midwives, old women, empiricks and illiterate persons ...” (Griggs, 1997, p120).

The empirical wisdom held by women healers has had to survive the marginalising, ostracising and even outright persecution of centuries of suppression. As MD and Herbalist Aviva Romm notes, with considerable restraint, “There is a remarkable absence of women healers in the archives of medicine” (Romm, 2010, p8). The historical pattern of devaluing, ignoring, appropriating, plagiarising and demonising the contribution of women healers has prevailed until modern times.

Achterberg writes in "Woman as Healer", "The experience of women healers, like the experience of women in general, is a shadow throughout the record of the world." (Achterberg, 1990, p8).

This is evident throughout Grigg's history.

What was the role and contribution of women in the history of herbal medicine? Every mother’s instinct is to nurture, nourish, calm, comfort, heal, treat and protect. Yet over the centuries the contribution of women was ignored, dismissed, devalued or the subject of hostile opposition – even for men who became the champions of that wisdom, nurtured as carefully throughout hostile centuries as any mother nurtures her own child.

Green Pharmacy makes no mention of the witch hunts the swept Europe in the Middle Ages. This must surely have its significant impact on the unfolding of herbal medicine in history. Millions of people were executed for "witchcraft" and 85% of these were women. "In the witch hunts, the church explicitly legitimised the doctors' professionalism, denouncing non-professional healing as equivalent to heresy: "If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die." (Of course, there wasn't any way for a woman to study.)" (Ehrenreich & English, 2010, p 56).






 
Griggs mentions the effect of the industrial revolution according to Flora Thompson on p 233: “… the knowledge and use of these (wild herbs) was dying out” but not the loss of knowledge as a result of the witch hunts, or how such knowledge managed to survive in spite of such persecution. The loss of collective wisdom as a result of this femicide, sweeping through several centuries and across nations, can never be known. Yet the knowledge, though driven underground as it is during persecution, did survive, at least in part, and continued to be handed down and shared, even with those men of the establishment who had open hearts, ears and minds.

Hippocrates, like Paracelsus, has been lauded as the ‘father of medicine’. Yet thousands of years before Hippocrates gave us his holistic and common sense approach, there are reports of a woman physician in the city of Sais in Egypt.

Modern students of herbal medicine learn about the Smith (Surgical) Papyrus and the Ebers Papyrus which tells of the practices of the priests/magicians/physicians. However, not often found in the curriculum is the story of the Kahun papyrus of ancient Egypt, that tells how only women treated women's diseases. This scroll was written for women practitioners. Egyptian priestesses were also physicians and keepers of healing traditions, not just the priests.

An Egyptian Queen, Queen Hatshepsut encouraged women to become physicians and set up three medical schools as well as botanical gardens. Queen Mentuhetep was buried with those items important to her, according to custom: ointment jars, tinctured and dried herbs, and measuring spoons (Romm, 2010, p12).

Students of herbalism learn that there is a connection between the Egyptian healing tradition and the Greeks who borrowed the concepts and built on them further. Most curricula don’t mention the women who were part of that connection, and that passing on of the knowledge, from the Egyptians to the Greeks. Polydamna, the physician-queen, gave us knowledge of the opium poppy and its sedative qualities, and she trained Helen of Troy, who brought herbal knowledge from ancient Egypt to ancient Greece (ibid).

By the time of Hippocrates, the role of women in society had sunk to a very low status. They did not count as citizens. They were chattels. They were servants. Their role in the healing arts was marginalised. Their voice was invalid. In a socio-political milieu of such misogyny, it is unlikely that the wisdom of women can have continued to have a moderating or contributing influence on the intelligence of the day. It is at this time in history that we can see that the masculine ways of ordering, structuring and dictating knowledge came to the fore.

Even so, it is interesting to speculate whether Hippocrates was one of these remarkable men we happen upon throughout history, who had an openness to appreciating the wisdom of the feminine - as well as the wisdom of the masculine. Did he have any feminine influences? In particular, his emphasis on careful and detailed observation of a patient before prescribing seems to hold hues of the "meet before you treat", "connect before you direct", "listen to their story" approaches that we typically ascribe to the wisdom of the feminine. The feminine wisdom advises accepting, yielding, receiving, conceiving and internalising before impetus can occur or positive action taken.

The great value of the masculine approach is apparent in the work of these founding patriarchs. The drive to create order and systems from apparent chaos or randomness, the curiosity and drive to know more, learn more, to inquire - these things that the masculine mind in us all loves - is clear in Aristotle's work. But he was eclectic enough to keep an open mind to all that he could not harness, grasp and nail down into neat little lists and categories. His belief that nature is inherently trustworthy indicates that, like Hippocrates, there was a balance between the wisdom of the masculine and of the feminine in his thinking.

The history of herbalism as taught to most modern students may not include the fact that Aristotle had a partner in his wife, Pythias, who "assisted" him, and as every wife knows, may well have done rather more than merely "assist". How much of her influence and own inquiring mind contributed to what we have received from Aristotle? Pythias was a keen researcher in anatomy and made detailed drawings of chick and human embryos, and well as co-writing a text with Aristotle on the flora and fauna of one of the Greek Islands (ibid).

Then we learn of Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder. Again we see the value of the masculine mind at work in the way Theophrastus devoted his life to capturing knowledge, listing and cataloguing knowledge and getting it recorded. This ability to provide structure and framework is classic wisdom of the masculine. So we were given the gifts of De Historia Plantarum and Pliny's The Natural History with its data of 900 different herbs! These are indeed incredible feats of scholarship. Yet when Pliny included "… magical and superstitious elements of folk wisdom" (ibid), perhaps this was his way of keeping the balance of the masculine and feminine wisdoms, being careful not to utterly dismiss what the greatest minds of the day still could not fathom or explain.

What we don't read about in standard herbal histories is that both Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder praised the work of Queen Artemisia of Caria for her healing abilities. Artemisia is credited with introducing wormwood as a cure for various ailments. Pliny also wrote of several woman who authored medical books, including Elephantis and Lais (ibid).

Still, the position for women in ancient Greece was abysmal. The following is an example of the kind of catch-22 women have often found themselves in throughout history, such as during the witch hunts - when they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

Again, this is from Aviva Romm's 2010 text, "Botanical Medicine for Women's Health".

Women were forbidden to study medicine and the penalty was death. 

 Yet women were dying in large numbers because male medical doctors refused to treat them.

So Agnodice of Athens disguised herself as a man and attended medical school.

On graduating, women flooded to her practice. She was arrested and put on trial.

Women protested and threatened to commit suicide en masse unless she was freed.

Not only was she freed and permitted to practice, but women were permitted to study medicine - as long as they only treated women and children.

 

Numerous famed physicians followed in the footsteps of Agnodice, including Cleopatra, a physician practicing at the time of Galen.

Cleopatra wrote an extensive gynaecological text but it was falsely attributed to a male writer of the 6th Century and it was plagiarized by Soranus in his text, "Gynaecology". (How did these men gain such authoritative knowledge of women's health and illness in a culture where men refused to treat women?)

This is an example of the pattern of women's work and wisdom being appropriated by men and credited to men.

Ages before, the oldest medical treatise written by a woman called Metrodora was attributed to a man named Metrodorus! Even Trotula of the famed Solerno University in Italy, a college that was actually open to women students as well as men, was cheated in such a way. Some men held that her writings, ‘The Trotula’ were not hers: "no woman could possibly have written it" and claimed that her work was that of a man.

 

Throughout history we can see this recurring theme. Women had the knowledge. They generously shared the knowledge. They just didn't get the credit for the knowledge.

They were expected to defer to men and to remain hidden, in the back ground, inconsequential.

Pliny the Elder advised women healers to practice inconspicuously “… so that after they were dead, no one would know they had lived” (ibid, p10).  Here is another pattern we still often see when women place their hope in a particular male figure, hoping that he will be a faithful champion of their cause and then are let down. Pliny was unable to fully dis-entangle himself from the prevailing misogyny of his age and ours when he advised his women peers to be inconspicuous to avoid inciting male jealousy.

The shadow of women’s under-rated contribution to the progress of the healing arts is cast from ancient times through the Middle Ages.

On p 158 on Green Pharmacy, Griggs lists “… crusading men who hurled themselves against the entrenched battlements of the medical establishment”. It is interesting to note that each of these men, and several more, were influenced by women healers. History may not give us their names - while the names of their male protégées are there for posterity – but these men who grew to prominence nevertheless gave credit to the influence of such women on their lives.

* Paracelsus, ‘the father of modern medicine’ is said to have “burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he had learned from the sorceress all he knew” (Ehrenreich & English, 2010, p 53).

Could this refer to one “sorceress” in particular, or if he is speaking collectively as he seems to have according to Griggs on p 48: “A Physitian ought not to rest only in that bare knowledge which their Schools teach, but to learn of old women, Egyptians and such like persons”. Griggs also makes reference to “these country healers and gypsies”.

* Culpeper – had a career among the “sick poor” (p 94) and must have come into contact with the “herb-women offering their cheap wares” (p 110) in contrast to the greedy apothecaries and their expensive imported concoctions. Culpeper reinforced a tradition of “domestic herbal medicine” at a time when “professional” physicians like Sydenham poured contempt on such homely remedies: “every house has its old woman, or practitioner, skilled in an art she has never learned, to the killing of mankind” (p 95). (Note the echo of the witch hunt mentality: “If a woman dares to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die!”)

* Samuel Thomson – was treated by “a local herb doctor” whom we are only to know as “the widow Benton” (p 155) whose knowledge may have come through Indian healers. We can presume that Mrs Benton didn’t share the racial arrogance and lack of “patient willingness to learn” Griggs described on p 103 which prevented Europeans from receiving knowledge from the indigenous people. We don’t know her name, only whose chattel she once was and her status vis a vis a man. Who was she and what is her real story about how she became a healer?

Other prominent (male) names in herbal history also owe a debt to women healers, whose contribution seems to be largely minimised and dismissed:

* Albert Coffin – found a receptive audience among working class & country people who “could remember a mother or a village wise woman who doctored them with herbs” (p188) and was healed by “an old gypsy-looking woman” from the Seneca Indian nation (p190), which opened up his mind to learn more from the Indians – ) unlike, apparently, most Europeans, as Griggs explains on page 103.)

* John Skelton – learned plant medicine from “an old village doctoress and midwife” – his grandmother (p 203). We don’t know her name or how she learned her craft – but we do know the value of her knowledge was dismissed with such phrases as “every old countrywoman practised it” (p205).

* Jean Valnet – was influenced by his maternal grandmother, the village midwife, who had a “wonderful knowledge of plants” (p 288)
* “An old woman in Shropshire” – used foxglove to cure ‘dropsy’ (p 138).
* “One of the native women” of Puerto Rico is credited with using guaiac to cure syphilis (p 36)

*Alfred Vogel (1902-1996) of Bioforce – credits his grandmother in particular, to introducing him to the plants of the Swiss fields, meadows and woods in his childhood.

Griggs alludes to the age-old folly of dismissing the wisdom of the feminine in favour of the wisdom of the masculine again on page 157 when she writes, “The phrase ‘old wives’ tale's’ indicates another of the dismissive attitudes that herbal medicine has had to endure .... it is a fact that for thousands of years, in almost every culture, the day-to-day use of herbs has been practiced largely by women – the simplicity, the homeliness and the earthy practicality of such a medicine perhaps recommending itself more strongly to the feminine mind than that of the ambitious, out-going male.”

Modern education still tends to have us focus on the patriarchs of medical history, and re-visit their stepping stones throughout history. The women's stones are still largely overlooked, so we are seeing a one-sided history.

The philosophy of women healers, their contribution to medicine and their relationship to modern philosophy and practice is a fascinating conversation, especially in the light of the destruction of the midwifery model around the world, in favour of an obstetric monopoly, and moves against CAM models of care in various places, in favour of an allopathic monopoly.

The target never has been herbalism or homeopathy or midwifery – it has always been the wisdom of the feminine, and those who notice it, respect it, learn it or champion it simply become collateral damage.

The wisdom of the masculine has been asserted as superior in reason, logic and rationalism since the times of the ancients.

Since then, those who accepted or acknowledged any degree of the wisdom of the feminine have tended to be discounted.

This is how patriarchy works. The establishment is strongly in the wisdom of the masculine, and will not sanction or approve any student or practitioner unless they conform to standards set in the wisdom of the masculine which assert that they must accept received knowledge that favours the masculine and ignores the existence of the feminine. This is why women entering the male domain, such as Elizabeth Blackwell entering the halls of male medicine did nothing to revive the feminine - she was required to actually turn on the very people who held that knowledge, in order to be allowed to graduate.

Yet throughout history, the wisdom of the feminine has been sustained. Here is a comment the author received in an email from a student herbalist: "“In some ways it feels contradictory to me to have formal training in something that is so intuitive and knowledge/ information is so readily available. Women's wisdom and Herbal wisdom to me feels like just accessing a part of me that I already know, kind of like re-remembering the knowledge that already lies deep within my DNA.”

In a novel entitled, "Australia Street" by Ann Whitehead, Penguin 2008, the author tells the story of a traditional herbalist called 'Grandma Ade': "A knowledge of timing had been passed down her line through many years. If her maternal ancestors hadn't fled to Germany four hundred years ago, back to England a few centuries later, then on to Australia, they would have been called witch or gypsy, depending on the country and the era, and drowned in dunking stools, incarcerated for life, or gassed in crowded ovens. If her ancestors had not been prudent enough to leave each place at the right time, that line of healers would have ended long ago. Grandma Ade could cure almost anything with her herbal concoctions, or so the local women said, and they preferred her to hospital when their time came for birthing ..."

Grandma Ade kept backyard chickens and made a healing chicken broth, and believed you had to treat the chickens kindly, even during slaughter, or the healing quality of the broth would be affected.

Another of Whitehead’s character defends Grandma Ade saying, "It's nothing to do with witchcraft. It's knowing which combination of herbs will help. The practice has been around for thousands of years. Midwifery. Natural medicine. Knowledge passed down through centuries added to what some people call a 6th sense."

There's also a mention of 'Grandma Ade' referring her clients on to allopathic doctors when she knew a problem was beyond her scope.

Whitehead’s story is an interesting comment on the survival of traditional herbalism from ancient times, through the witch hunts of the middle ages, to European settlement in Australia.

Executing intuitive herbalists, or driving them underground, or regulating them, or prosecuting them, can never eradicate such knowledge. This has been attempted in that other manifestation of women's healing: midwifery.

In 1909, the damning Flexner Report, funded by the capitalist Carnegie Corporation and deceitfully backed by the AMA, ushered in a new, more sophisticated kind of ‘witch hunt’ against the wisdom of the feminine as it manifested in midwifery and natural healing.

This was founded on the belief that the validity of "regular" or allopathic medicine rested upon physicians practicing with a basis in scientific methods. The Flexner report marked the turning point on the war against midwifery by stating that one of the goals was to eliminate midwives in order to pave the way for an obstetrical monopoly over maternity services (Ping, 2010).

In 1910, when approximately 50 percent of all births were done by midwives, new licensing laws were established to dictate that medicine be practiced by medical doctors trained at a certified medical institution as suggested by the Flexner Report. Those practicing midwifery or healing without a license to practice, were persecuted as criminals (Berg, 1999).

In his student essay, “Around the continent in 180 days: the controversial journey of Abraham Flexner”, Mark Hiatt describes how the Flexner Report, backed by the commercial interests of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and AMA "Men's Club", targeted "Eclectics, Chiropractors and Homeopaths". Hiatt describes how medical education for women was totally eliminated with the closing of all three women's colleges because there was "no need" for them. Flexner then projected blame for this demise onto the women themselves (a tactic often used) when he claimed that women had no desire or inclination for medical education - despite there being women-founded and women-attended medical schools for thousands of years, since the time of Hatshepsut, Eudocia and Radegonde. In contrast, Flexner decided that 2 of 7 schools for African American ("Negro") men might stay open. Evidently his sexism ever so slightly exceeded his racism, referred to rather tentatively by Hiatt when he wrote: "... the face of the medical profession became more homogenous with respect to gender and race" (Hiatt, 1998).

It would be useful for those invested in herbal medicine and CAM to realise that CAM was not the only target of the Flexner Report and those who were behind it. We should know who our allies are.

The target is the wisdom of the feminine ... not only alternative medicine and not only midwifery.

If midwifery or CAM cannot uphold the feminine as equal with the masculine, can we hold out any hope that the "regulars" of the modern day will?

For any organism to thrive to its best potential, there must be a mutually honouring balance of both the wisdom of the feminine and the wisdom of the masculine, with neither dominating or exerting a monopoly over the other, but both having a humble, receptive attitude towards the other. We can see how men such as Thomson and Coffin began well with the humility to learn from indigenous people and women, but made the same error as the very establishment they railed against, when they closed their minds to learning more and made the same mistake as the regulars: they believed they were holders of comprehensive and final truth, instead of eternal students (Griggs, 1997, p 201).

In the future we will see that unless CAM joins forces with midwifery and unites to protect a balance of the feminine & masculine energies and wisdoms in the field of health, wellness and healing - and this will incorporate ethnobotany and indigenous healing traditions, which are often strong in the wisdom of the feminine - all three fields will continue to be dominated by the patriarchal mainstream model of medicine.

References

Griggs, B. (1997). Green Pharmacy – the history and evolution of western herbal medicine. Vermont: Healing Arts Press.

Romm, A. (2010). Botanical medicine for women’s health. Missouri: Elsevier.

Ehrenreich, B & English, E. (2010). Witches, midwives & nurses: a history of women healers. USA: The Feminist Press.

Hiatt, M. (1998) Around the continent in 180 days: the controversial journey of Abraham Flexner. Retrieved from: http://rienstraclinic.com/documents/FlexnerPharos.pdf

Berg, J. (1999) Midwives as the Quintessential Barefoot Doctors. Retrieved from http://www.jimbergmd.com/midwives_as_the_quintessential_b.htm

Ping, E. (2010) Causes of the Formation of Nurse Midwifery in the United States During the Early Twentieth Century. Retrieved from: http://www.academia.edu/467545/Causes_of_the_Formation_of_Nurse_Midwifery_in_the_United_States_During_the_Early_Twentieth_
Century

Hildegard of Bingen