Old Wives' Tales E-Book

Mary Chamberlain

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

We may all know that dandelions make us wet the bed, and that stewed prunes are a cure for constipation, but how many of us were aware that a poultice of chicken manure is a remedy for baldness? Or that eel liver will aid a difficult labour? The woman healer is as old as history. For millennia she has been doctor, nurse and midwife, and even in the age of modern medicine her wisdom is handed down in the form of old wives' tales. Using extensive research into archives and original texts, and numerous conversations with women in city and countryside, Mary Chamberlain presents a stimulating challenge to the history of orthodox medicine and an illuminating survey of female wisdom which goes back to the earliest times. What are old wives' tales? Where do they come from? Do they really work? These questions, and many more, are answered in this fascinating compendium of remedies and cures handed down from mother to daughter from the beginning of time.

Leseprobe

Old Wives’ Tales

The History of Remedies, Charms and Spells

Old Wives’ Tales

The History of Remedies, Charms and Spells

MARY CHAMBERLAIN

First published in 1981

This edition published in 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2012

All rights reserved

© Mary Chamberlain, 1981, 2006, 2010, 2012

The right of Mary Chamberlain to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 8679 6

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 8678 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

PART ONE: OLD WIVES

ONE

Introduction

TWO

From Goddess to Sorceress

Women healers in Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Rome

THREE

From Sorceress to Witch

The old wife in medieval Europe and seventeenth-century England

FOUR

From Expert to Charlatan

The old wife and the medical profession in eighteenth-century England

FIVE

Alternatives for the Sick

The old wife and the sick poor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England

SIX

Conclusions

Perspectives on the medical profession and the old wife

PART TWO: TALES

SEVEN

Introduction to Remedies

EIGHT

Remedies

Notes

Bibliography

For Rosie and Kate

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first and foremost my husband, Peter Lane, who not only gave me invaluable practical and moral support through the writing of this book, but also advised and criticised my ideas and drafts with judgement and infinite patience. I would also like to thank Carol Fisher for her helpful comments on all the drafts, Anna Coote and Ann Oakley for their criticisms of the final draft and Ursula Owen at Virago for all her help in the compiling and writing of the book.

I am indebted to Belinda Ackerman of the Association of Radical Midwives, Philip Corrigan, Auriel Hill of the Association for the Improvement in Maternity Services, Jane Mace, Nancy MacKeith, Angela Phillips and Kathy Savage for their comments and contributions to individual chapters. In addition, James Cornford, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Jean Donnison, Roger Fieldsend, Mike Fisher, Alastair Kerr, Arthur Lane, Alan Maryon-Davis, John Pickstone, Enid Porter, Bill Williams, Bob Williamson, the staff of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities of the British Museum, and the staff of the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, all helped direct me to sources or answered questions and to them I am grateful.

I also owe a debt to the East Suffolk Federation of Women’s Institutes, whose members contributed enormously to the collection of remedies, to Radio Orwell for inviting me to do a ‘phone-in’ programme on Old Wives’ Tales, to Lambeth Social Services for allowing me to interview residents in their Homes for the Elderly and to the residents themselves, to the Matron and residents of Glebe House, Woodbridge, Suffolk (Suffolk Social Services) for the same, to Mrs Coker, Mrs Copping, Mrs Heiser, Mrs Murray, Mr Stronger and Mrs Wallace for their interviews, and to the Earl of Albemarle, Mr Richard Allnutt, Lt Col. R.B. Longe, the Earl of Stradbroke and the Suffolk Record Office for permission to use their material on remedies. There are many other people to whom I have spoken throughout the research for this book and who, wittingly or unwittingly, have given me material and thanks are due to them.

Finally, I must thank my aunt, Lilian Hewson, who told me a great deal about my great-grandmother, and my parents who told me many old wives’ tales as well as looking after my children at various stages in writing the book. To them I am especially grateful.

Mary Chamberlain,

London 1981

PART ONE

Old Wives

ONE

Introduction

THEY CALLED MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER the ‘Angel of Alsace Street’. 1 If anyone was in labour, she would be there with her basins and rags delivering the babies and attending the mothers. If anyone was sick, the first person they would fly to was old grandma. When neighbours died, she laid them out. She took care of her local community in birth and death, and for much of the period in between. And she did this for little or no remuneration.

She was an ‘old wife’, a handywoman. My great-grandmother, and others like her, were familiar figures in most working-class communities until well into this century. They were the usual resort for the sick and poor. Doctors existed, but they were often too expensive for the family budget, or simply unpopular. In preference, the first treatment for the sick was usually at home, with the advice of a wise and trusted neighbour.

Some old wives, like Mrs Mapp, the eighteenth-century bone-setter from Epsom, or Margaret Kennox, the Elizabethan herbalist, acquired legendary fame; but for the most part they were local figures, often indistinguishable from other members of the community. What skills or knowledge they possessed they held inter-alia. For they were also mothers and workers. In 1894 in Whitechapel, for instance, a poor woman

aged nineteen was dying of blood poisoning a month after delivering herself of a still born child. A doctor was summoned, but when he found he was not to be paid ‘refused to do anything’ and left. The Poor Law medical officer’s locum was then called but he refused to help without a fee or a Relief Order. During this month and for twenty days afterwards, the woman’s only attention came from a ‘handywoman’ at a nearby newsvendor’s shop.2

On the whole, the old wife did not earn her living exclusively from her practice, and she held no formal qualifications. Entry into the ranks of the old wives was achieved through experience or a form of apprenticeship. My great-grandmother had sixteen children, and this was deemed sufficient qualification. Another woman, Mrs Coker, though she ultimately entered service, began a midwifery apprenticeship under her mother, an ‘old wife’, in the 1890s. This is how she described it:

Of course there was no help in those days, it was all home nursing, no hospital. It’s all so different now. They just used to send for her. Sometimes I think that’s how she got her asthma, getting out of a hot bed and going out in the streets in the middle of the night to these people.

I used to watch her bringing the baby into the world and cut the cord. I know I wasn’t very old but I was quite capable. I could now, if necessary. Nobody about and anyone was in trouble I could help … She was a marvellous midwife. They told her she got the nerve of a thousand people because she had her photo taken with two dead babies in her arms. Well, I take after her for nerves. Nothing has ever feared me.

What you need most is nerve. I’d go with her, and rub their backs and keep them walking. It was important to keep them walking, helped speed up the labour … 3

Not all old wives were midwives. Some were general healers and others held quite specific skills, like wart-charming. Those specific skills which required little basic knowledge were often surrounded in mystery and secrecy, and would be passed down through families. A Suffolk wart-charmer explained:

I learnt the cure from my aunt, before she died she told me. She didn’t like to feel that it was lost. So she told me how to do it up. It seems to work, it seems to have cured everybody that I’ve given it to. My aunt always said you mustn’t tell anybody what you put in it, but she thought it was a shame to lose it, that’s why she passed it on to me … 4

‘Charming’ burns was often likewise shrouded in secrecy and, particularly in rural areas in the nineteenth century and earlier, certain individuals were believed to hold special properties of healing and prophecy. The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter was often sought out for these skills.

But with these examples we begin to approach the fanciful and what is now a popular perception of the ‘old wife’. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines an old wife as ‘an old woman, now usu. disparagingly’. ‘Old wives’ tales’ it registers as ‘trivial stories, such as are told by garrulous old women’. Indeed, the ultimate dismissal for a piece of advice is to term it ‘an old wives’ tale’.

Throughout recent history old wives have been for the most part middle-aged or elderly women. But their age and sex were virtues, and they were consulted for their wisdom and experience, for their acquired skills or knowledge. They achieved what local reputation they had from their successes in the area of health care. They were the custodians of communal and community medical knowledge. But this knowledge was free and freely given. With little or no money at stake there was no need to preserve a ‘closed’ profession in terms of entry, training and dissemination of knowledge. Old wives’ tales – the body of popular medical lore – have now almost died, killed off by the monopoly achieved by the medical profession and its intellectual hegemony over scientific ideas. They are now regarded largely as superstition – as ritual devoid of content. This view ignores the context in which old wives and old wives’ tales found currency. It ignores also an approach to health care which sought as much comfort in explanation and participation (albeit often in a ritualistic way) as in a solution. Old wives’ tales and the old wife represented communal health care – they were a neighbourhood resource with no barriers of class, education or money to separate them from the community.

Yet the role of these women as unofficial healers is one that has been largely ignored by medical histories. We are now accustomed to think of doctors and healers as men. We are led to believe that this was always so. The history of medicine is on the whole seen to be the history of great men and discoveries in science. It is also a history of medical institutions and professions. But the story of women in health care is vitally important. The old wives’ tale should be heard, not only to redress a historical imbalance, but also for the insights it may now throw on modern medical practices.

The purpose of this book is, therefore, to restore the memory of the old wife and her place in the community and to collect some old wives’ tales before they are lost. It tells the story of women as ‘unofficial’ healers and looks at some of the advice and remedies they offered. It attempts to place old wives and old wives’ tales in a social and historical context and to offer an explanation of how our perception of the old wife has developed. ‘The healer’s role’, as the medical anthropologist David Landy points out, ‘… is a key role since the healer is dealing with matters of life and death and what happens to the curer may be an important barometer of what is going on in the total process of socio-cultural change.’ 5

The book is divided into two parts: the first traces the old wife in history and the second catalogues some old wives’ tales. But first, some words of warning: in tracing the role of women as unofficial healers we must, by definition, also trace the development of official healers. The one cannot exist without the other. But decisions as to who was deemed ‘unofficial’ or ‘official’ and, therefore, whose form of medical practice became legitimate and orthodox depended not on the nature of medical practice but on the relationship of the practitioners to what constituted political power in any one period.

Our current perceptions of medical orthodoxy, and legitimacy have been determined by this relationship as it has existed through different periods of history. Its origins go back to the classical periods of Greece and Rome, and earlier. Chapter 2 looks at the old wife in this formative period of Western medicine. Chapter 3 traces the attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church towards medicine and assesses its role in the formation of the medical profession and in the development of an association between healing and witchcraft. This chapter starts in Europe in the Dark Ages but ends by assessing the nature of witchcraft and the state of the medical profession in England in the Middle Ages. Chapter 4 looks at England in the eighteenth century, principally, and at the beginnings of the professional organisation of doctors and its implications for the old wife. Chapter 5 traces the erosion of domestic medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after the economic, social and political changes of that period. In particular, it looks at how the old wife survived in certain, limited, areas where the state and doctors chose not to enter. Old wives began as goddesses but ended as back-street abortionists.

Tracing a small thread through such a large historical and geographical area has necessarily resulted in some simplifications both of arguments and, more crucially, historical processes. I am fully aware of this. But I hope that distortions which might arise from this do not detract from the overall theme of the book.

Where possible, I have tried to use primary sources. This was easier for the second half of the book than for the first; for the historical narrative I have had to rely largely on secondary sources, particularly for the early and medieval periods. These sources have been written from a particular perspective where references to old wives are few and, when they do occur, are placed either in a small footnote or in a negative context. This in itself is indicative of the place women as healers have been granted in history, but it makes it difficult to build up an independent portrait of the old wife and her place in society at any particular time.

But the problem of obtaining sources on old wives is wider than this. For the old wife was more than a healer. She was a woman and, latterly, predominantly working-class. Until relatively recently, little historical effort has been expended on working-class, social or women’s histories. The evidence relating to these areas is, therefore, often thin. For the commonplaces of the common people are rarely documented, even by themselves. There are few oral and even fewer written sources with which to document the old wives’ tale. We can only discover a limited amount. The rest has been constructed from the gaps and silences in testimony. The silences are often overwhelming. For many of my deductions, there is no conclusive evidence. In time, more evidence may be unearthed. Till then we can best reiterate Adrienne Rich’s sentiments when she wrote:

with a painful consciousness of my own Western cultural perspective and that of most of the sources available to me; painful because it says so much about how female culture is fragmented by the male cultures, boundaries, groupings in which women live. However, at this point any broad study of female culture can at best be partial, and what any writer hopes – and knows – is that others like her, with different training, background and tools, are putting together other parts of this immense half-buried mosaic in the shape of a woman’s face. 6

Old wives played a central role in what Rich describes as ‘female culture’. The disparity between the official record and actual experience is often enormous. I hope this book begins to close this gap a little.

Old Wives’ Tales is a history of the old wife and her role in domestic medicine. It is a history of women as unofficial healers, for women were the main practitioners of this art. It is not a history of alternatives to the doctor. There is, therefore, no discussion of men who practised ‘domestic’ medicine or offered alternatives to orthodox practice, even though in some instances what they offered was indistinguishable from that offered by women. Occasionally they are mentioned in the text but without comment. Similarly, there is no discussion of what we now call ‘alternative’ medicine, for example homeopathy or acupuncture. Herbalism does feature, particularly in Chapter 5 and in the second half of the book which lists cures and remedies. This is because herbalism, and remedies using herbal ingredients, were an aspect of domestic medicine. But the book is not a history of herbalism, nor a handbook for herbalists. It is the old wife’s tale.

TWO

From Goddess to Sorceress

Women healers in Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Rome

Men generally have a view of the nature of their society. They also have views concerning what validates the society’s arrangements. The two things, image and validation, never are and cannot be wholly distinct … A society can possess a world creation story, in which the creation of the world and the foundations of society itself are tied up: the cosmic and social foundation stones may be identical or both may be invoked to validate the social order … 1

LET US BEGIN WITH A TALE. There was a garden of paradise in Sumar, which had four rivers, including the Euphrates and Tigris. The great mother goddess Ninchursag allowed eight beautiful plants to grow in this garden, though she forbade the inhabitants to eat from them. Enki, the water god, defied Ninchursag and ate from them and she, angry about it, condemned him to death though she did not expel him from the garden. Enki fell ill, eight of his organs were affected and his strength began to fail him. But a fox was able to persuade Ninchursag to save Enki from death. She then enquired about his suffering and created one healing deity for each of his sick organs. 2

Ancient cultures believed that medicine was the prerogative of women, a prerogative ordained by the goddess and reflected in practice. Yet the history of medicine usually begins with the ‘father’ of medicine, the Greek physician Hippocrates. This beginning reflects the need of doctors to show the antique but scientific basis of their profession. It also reflects assumptions regarding the rightful practitioners of medicine. For within the Hippocratic tradition of medicine, which dominated European medical thought until the seventeenth century at least, women had few rights and little role or scope. Moreover, as inheritors of this tradition we now have particular notions of what is medically orthodox and what is not. ‘Old wives’ tales’ have been placed firmly in the camp of the medically unorthodox and the inferior. Within such a perspective there is little room for assessing either the value of the methods or the social importance of ‘unorthodox’ practice.

The gap between our current perceptions of medicine and the prime role enjoyed by women in healing in those early pre-classical cultures is enormous. We cannot know for certain how this gap developed, but certain themes current in modern attitudes towards medicine can be traced backwards through time. The themes concern the development of scientific orthodoxy through its association with political and religious elites. The tradition we have now inherited has its origins variously in Egypt, Greece, Rome and Palestine. This chapter attempts to outline some of the more important elements relating to the practices of medicine in these ancient cultures.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPLANATION OF DISEASE AND HEALTH

The earliest explanations of disease were religious. Among many ancient cultures and many ‘primitive’ cultures studied by anthropologists, the same phenomenon has been recorded. Medicine and religion were so closely inter-related that it was impossible to disentangle the two. The deities who created life or commanded death were also responsible for health and sickness. The Sumerians held Ninchursag, the goddess of life, accountable for health and childbirth. The Assyrian goddess Ishtar was both mother goddess and goddess of health. Isis, the great goddess of the Egyptians, was also their physician. The Minoans, Myceneans, Cretans and early Greeks also worshipped female deities of healing and life. The goddess of death was also the goddess of resurrection. Gula, the Assyrian goddess of death, was labelled ‘the great physician’. Isis carried about her symbols of death. In the cycle of existence, life and death were inextricable.

But if the benign deities were attributed with knowledge of health and were held responsible for it, malign demons were charged with sickness and ill health. It is believed that the Sumerians were the first to personify the demons of disease. Such personification also developed among the peoples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome and among the northern Teutonic tribes. The Israelites believed that it was the Destroying Angel who stood by the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, and that Satan afflicted Job. The Anglo-Saxons believed that the spirits of sickness were called elves or dwarves and fired arrows or darts – known as ‘elf-shot’ – at their victims. The belief in the power of demons to bring on sickness is an element in Christian exorcism rites.

Cures were thought to be effected, in the first place, by prayer or command to the deity or demons. But oral rites were always accompanied by practical measures. These practical measures were given authority by their creation and use by the goddess. An Egyptian remedy for a headache, for instance, states that it was:

made by the goddess Isis for the god Ea himself, in order to drive away the pains in his head:

Coriander berries

1

Berries of the Xaset plant

1

Wormwood

1

Berries of the Sames plant

1

Juniper berries

1

Honey

1

To be mixed and smeared on the head. 3

Prayer and practice were important factors in the treatment of the sick. For the fear generated by the unknown and arbitrary nature of sickness could be assuaged by appeals to the supernatural, while practical treatment secured an immediate sensation of relief and control. The remedy was believed to work partly because of its method, partly because of the intrinsic worth of its ingredients, but largely because of the power of its practitioners. The pharmacological base may not have been well founded, yet it represented a process of experimentation which was essentially scientific. For though failure and success could be explained in terms of the wrath or good will of the deities, the approach remained fundamentally empirical. The priestesses were required not only to know the properties and attributes of the healing deities and the appropriate prayers and incantations but also to have an extensive knowledge of botany, minerals, and animal derivatives used in medical prescriptions. Indeed, the Sumerians, Egyptians and Assyrians, for instance, had an impressive list of drugs used in the treatment of specific diseases in the form of pills, suppositories, lotions or ointments.

PRIESTESSES, HEALERS AND MIDWIVES

The religious explanation of illness and its treatment helped support and perpetuate the position of its earthly functionaries. The practitioners of healing in the preclassical cultures of the Near and Middle East were also the religious guardians.

In nearly all areas of the world, goddesses were extolled as healers, dispensers of curative herbs, roots, plants and other medical aids, casting the priestesses who attended the shrines into the role of physicians of those who worshipped there. 4

In Sumer, Assyria, Egypt and Greece until about the third millennium the practice of healing was almost exclusively in the hands of priestesses. And within those societies, the role of priestess was paramount. In Sumer, for instance, there were many kinds of priestesses whose importance in the economic, political, cultural and social life of the country was enormous. Business was conducted in the temple and there is evidence that writing was developed there by women: ‘It was the goddess Nidaba in Sumer who was paid honour as the one who initially invented clay tablets and the art of writing … The official scribe of the Sumerian heaven was a woman . . .’ 5 Archeological evidence indicates that the earliest examples of writing were discovered at the temple of the Queen of Heaven in Erech, in Sumer, over 5000 years ago. 6

Links between spiritual leaders and political rulers were also strong. Nearly all the high priestesses of the god Nanner in Ur were members of the royal family. In Assyria and Egypt, similarly, priestesses were called from high-born and royal families. A picture on the wall of the tomb of King Ramses III in Egypt shows Isis in the role of healer and the priestess/physician as intermediary. So close were the links between high priestesses and ruler that many of the queens of those ancient cultures were also temple physicians. In the grave of Queen Shubad of Ur, 3000 BC, there was buried not only food for her journey but also her prescriptions for stopping pain and medical instruments of bronze and flint.

Many of the Egyptian queens were also notable physicians, for example Queen Mentuhetep (2300 BC), Hatshepsut (1500 BC) and Cleopatra (100 BC). Pictures on the walls of temples and tombs of Egypt often illustrate women in their role of priestess/physician, and the writings of Diodorus, Euripides, Pliny and Herodotus testify to their eminence.

Yet among the women healers in Egypt and elsewhere there was some separation of roles. Midwifery was exclusively a woman’s concern, but was not necessarily conducted by a priestess. Priestesses were limited in number and high in rank. It was sufficient that they attended the sick who presented themselves for treatment at the temple. There were not enough of them to attend every confinement. And there were other reasons to explain why midwifery was separate from the temple ritual. Religion depends on mystery – on explaining or comprehending the unknown, but childbirth is a common, mechanical event. The midwife might have had skills, but they were craft skills perfected by practice, though recognised for their importance. In Sumer, midwives were educated and trained; in Egypt, midwifery was an area delineated for women and midwives were also educated and trained. The Ebers Papyrus, 7 which contains guidance on midwifery, indicates that knowledge of gynaecology and obstetrics was quite advanced, including not only childbirth and abortion but a range of other problems from breast cancer to prolapse of the womb.

Nevertheless, midwives could not ignore religion. Consequently, the goddesses kindly disposed towards pregnant women and those in labour were invoked, and the demons of birth, who were believed to devour babies and kill their mothers, were warded off. The relief of labour pains was sought through prayer and practical measures. A spell to relieve the pains of labour and facilitate birth, set down in the Leiden Papyrus (approximately second century AD) ends with the rubric: ‘Say the words four times over a dwarf of clay to be placed on the forehead of the woman who is giving birth’; while the Sumerians invoked the sympathy of Ereshkigal or the wife of the god Etana.

Midwifery was ‘subcontracted’ from the priestess who, for practical reasons, needed to delegate this area of activity, and could do so to women who could be safely trusted to proceed according to the correct cultural and religious practices. The mystery relating to creation lies not in the act of childbirth, but in conception and in protecting the health of the newborn child and its mother; in these areas the priestesses would again have been invoked. But it was likely, too, that the midwife, the one ‘who knows the inside’, 8 would also have been approached. The division of role between midwife and priestess/physician was thin but nevertheless functional. It implied no inferiority on the part of the midwife, nor rivalry with the priestess. Yet it was a division with important implication for the future.

There is evidence that other functions were delegated too. The earliest known chemists were two Mesopotamian women of the thirteenth century BC. Like the midwives, specific functions – in this case the dispensing of medicines and experimentation with new formulae – would only have been delegated to people who could be trusted. And in this early period the priestesses would also have made up their own prescriptions.

THE ENTRY OF THE GODS: RELIGION VERSUS MEDICINE

The near monopoly of the priestesses over medicine was ultimately eroded. The process was slow and by no means uniform. Among the different cultures of the Middle and Near East the process of erosion took different forms. But the cultural exchange between Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Hebrews meant that, by the end of the Roman Empire in approximately the fourth century AD, the role of women in medicine had been radically altered. Women were no longer the official arbiters and practitioners of medicine but, within medicine, social and scientific deviants.

The first step ‘in the limitation of the status of women’ was, as Briffault suggests, ‘to take over from them the monopoly of the religious functions’.9 And, we might add, the medical function. We do not know for certain why and how this monopoly was eroded and it is not within the scope of this book to document or discuss the research and large number of theories which relate to this period of change. What does seem clear, however, is that changes in the religion and culture of those early societies appear to have coincided with the Indo-European invasions of the Near and Middle East which occurred between the second and third millennium BC. 10 Their introduction into the cultures of the East was invariably marked by the emergence of a powerful male god transplanted from the religions of the Indo-European invaders. Among the Assyrians and Egyptians, the myths of creation were rewritten and the male deities began to acquire an equal, if not superior, position to the female deities. If the myths, as allegory, are to be believed, the battle was a bloody one, ‘I cannot help but recall’, wrote Merlin Stone, ‘the Greek legend of the Goddess known as Hera, whose worship appears to survive from Mycenaean times, and Her thwarted rebellion against Her newly assigned husband Zeus, surely an allegorical reminder of those who struggled for the primacy of the Goddess – and lost.’ 11

Whether the invasions themselves were directly responsible for changes in society, or whether they coincided with and gave impetus to changes already occurring, cannot be known.

But the result was that the primacy given to women in the process of creation, and in the ‘world view’ of those cultures, began to be displaced. By the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt (1570-1300 BC) women had been relegated to the role of temple musicians, no longer enjoying the status even of ‘clergy’. Previously the goddess Hat-hor, for instance, had been served by eighty-one priestesses and eighteen priests and Neith had been attended solely by priestesses. With this displacement from the temple went, necessarily, a displacement from medicine. Male healing deities began to emerge – Ea among the Assyrians and Ptah in Egypt. And as early as 3133 BC an Egyptian queen named Nitocris appointed a man – Imhotep – court physician (though other sources have placed him later, at the Court of King Hoser, 2980-2900 BC). He appears to have been the first male physician to be appointed court physician. He soon became ‘patron’ of doctors because of his association with ‘science and learning’, and was elevated to the rank of god, joining Ptah. The Greeks later identified him with their own ‘god’ of healing, Aesculapius.

EGYPT: THE DECLINE OF THE HEALER AND THE RISE OF THE SURGEON

The introduction of men into medicine signalled fundamental changes in the nature of medical practice in Egypt. Medicine began to develop independently from religion; it began to be anti-mystical. More important, the soothing incantations and balms of the priestesses began to be replaced by the surgeon’s knife. For male medicine in Egypt emerged alongside the practice of embalming which, by 2300 BC, had been perfected as a technique. The Egyptian embalmers were always men 12 and their practice led them to a detailed knowledge of anatomy and surgery. Their findings were written down and used by embalmers and surgeons alike. The Smith Papyrus, which dates from approximately 3000 BC, contains medical prescriptions which deal primarily with techniques for dealing with injuries, and clear advice for avoiding inoperable cases. Religion plays little part here in the diagnosis or treatment of injury. The ultimate authority for surgery was vested not in divine inspiration but in human knowledge. Sickness was rooted in the body and its causes were explicable; this knowledge became the prerogative of men. Male medicine began to stand for knowledge and discovery and women’s medicine for superstition.

In line with the growing separation of medicine and religion, medical schools were established at Heliopolis and Sais, Memphis and (later) Alexandria, where both surgeons and embalmers were trained. Moses is said to have studied at Heliopolis, and Sais and Alexandria were the centres of exchange between Greek and Egyptian physicians and surgeons. The entry of women into these schools was restricted. Significantly, the school at Sais specialised in gynaecology and obstetrics, and although there is evidence that women studied there, 13 the Kahum Papyrus (dated approximately 2500 BC and thought to have originated at Sais) deals with gynaecology as well as veterinary diseases and primarily contains guidance for surgical practices. It is likely, therefore, that surgeons – and therefore men – would have been called in to perform Caesarian sections and other obstetric or gynaecological surgery. It is possible that some midwives were trained in these techniques, but the evidence seems to suggest that on the whole the more complicated aspects of midwifery involving surgery began to be removed from their jurisdiction. Certainly, by 1560 BC, podalic version (the turning of the foetus into a birth presentation) was no longer practised by midwives but by priests.

Nevertheless, religion still had a role to play in the diagnosis and prognosis of the patient and even conferred its authority on to the new techniques of surgery and embalming. Isis, after all, gathered the slain body of Osiris and mummified him to preserve his pieces intact. Moreover, anatomy and surgery were inadequate for coping with every physical ailment. Traditional medicine therefore continued to operate alongside the new. What was known and could be repaired became the subject of the more secular practice of surgery, while what was unknown remained within the scope of a religious medical approach. But within the temple, this approach was now in the charge of priests.

Whatever claims to success the surgeons may have made, surgery throughout the Egyptian period was highly dangerous and extremely painful to the patient, 14 undertaken in an emergency when all else had failed. And the costs of embalming and surgery were high and therefore accessible only to the wealthy. The Egyptian poor dealt with their dead and dying by the traditional and only means available to them. They buried their dead in the desert and tried to cure or soothe their dying by traditional and non-surgical methods. Nevertheless, the removal of women from the temples necessarily reduced women’s status even in traditional medicine, while that of the male priest/physician who replaced them increased proportionately.

The status of priest/physician was enhanced too by the association of the male sex with surgery, science and courtly circles. Women continued to practise but without the authority of either science or religion. Indeed, the prime area in which they continued – largely because the separation from the temple had occurred earlier – was midwifery. But even here there were important differences. First, in relation to the temple midwives were now seen as inferior. Paradoxically, because of (or, perhaps, despite) this, their practice became broader.

Women’s and children’s complaints, as well as questions relating to sterility or conception, were now perceived to be midwives’ responsibility. Whereas before the priestess/physician and midwife would have shared this area of medicine, these were now seen as essentially women’s questions of which temple priests could be expected to know little. Also, even if the priest was consulted over a sickness or injury, nursing the patient back to health remained the task of women at home. This had always been so. But whereas formerly there was no gender separation between physician and nurse, there now was, and the gender separation also signified the split between the public and private role of women in medicine. Healing began to emerge as separate from the public, male, world of medicine, and became submerged in the domestic world.

THE HEBREWS: ONE RELIGION, ONE MEDICINE

By the second millennium BC the primacy of the woman in healing in Egypt had been challenged. But, though it was now diminished and less public, her role within medicine was still tolerated. In ancient Egypt – as in Greece – there remained a link between polytheism and a multiplicity of permitted methods of medicine and healing. Although the status of the methods shifted, essentially they were allowed to co-exist.

The peaceful co-existence of a variety of medical methods is a theme lacking in modern Western medicine. For the origins of this we must turn first to the Hebrews and then to the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, where the associations between men, science and orthodoxy were more rigorously developed. Ancient Hebrew society was patriarchal, hierarchical and authoritarian. It permitted one male God, and Him alone. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Lord God, Yahveh, was also the supreme healer of the sick. It is clear that the Hebrews knew that deities elsewhere claimed this healing function and that the practice of healing was often in the hands of women, especially in Egypt. Given the Hebrew belief in the low status of women, it is clear too that they did not wish this practice to become established within their own society.

If you will lend your ear to the laws and observe all the statutes, you will never contract any of the diseases of Egypt, for the Lord is your Physician … (Ex. 15:26)

… and will take away sickness, machalo, from your midst (Ex. 23:25)

The Hebrews tried to identify the practice of healing firmly with their god. They also anticipated early Christian attitudes – that sickness was the result of sin and that God alone had sole authority to heal. The elder in each generation was endowed with divine powers, under the direct guidance of Yahveh, to lead, instruct, judge and heal – an endowment first given to Adam ‘to subdue the earth and to have dominion over every living thing’. (Gen. 1:28). Indeed, the story of creation which dramatised the downfall of woman and of the serpent who had symbolised the power and knowledge of woman, necessarily also symbolised the end of the preponderance of women in healing and the end of the relationship between women and healing. For the snake was a symbol not only of the water goddess but also of healing. The two were closely connected.

In contrast to the Indo-Europeans, to whom Earth was the Great Mother, the Old Europeans created maternal images out of water and air divinities, the Snake and the Bird Goddess. A divinity who nurtures the world with moisture, giving rain, the divine food which metaphorically was also understood as mother’s milk, naturally became a nurse or mother. Indeed the terracotta figurines of an anthropomorphic snake or bird holding a baby are encountered at various periods and in many regions of old Europe and in Minoan, Cypriote and Mycenaean cultures as well. 15

The Egyptian goddess, Au Zet, the great serpent, was also a goddess of healing. For Hebrew society the symbolism of crushing the serpent meant the crushing not only of woman’s social position but also of her role in healing.

Although it was the Hebrew religion which provided the ultimate authority for the practice of medicine, it stood in marked contrast to Egyptian practice. The Hebrews’ knowledge of anatomy was minimal and consequently their surgery crude and limited. The emphasis was rather on sanitation, hygiene and the prevention of disease. The treatment of sickness relied principally on the use of herbs and spices, such as mandrake, saffron, camphor, myrrh, cinnamon, senna, balm of Gilead, oil and wine for wounds and aconite and curare for poisons. But the execution of medicine was believed to be the prerogative of men, bestowed by a male god. Any resort to methods beyond permitted Hebrew practice was denounced. Moses – himself a student at Heliopolis – was well versed in Egyptian medicine, and continually denounced its practices:

Regard not them that have familiar spirits; neither seek after wizards to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 19:81)

A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones; their blood shall be upon them. (Lev. 20:27)

There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or daughters to pass through fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard or a necromancer. (Deut. 18:10-11)

It is clear from these promulgations that practices antithetical to the Jews were continuing and that women, particularly Egyptian women, were to some extent responsible. Indeed, the extent to which they were defying the promulgations is made clear by references to midwives in the Old Testament. For women who found favour were those who restricted their role to midwifery, defied Egypt and found Yahveh’s favour – in other words, those who submitted to male control.

… and the King of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives (of which the name of one was Shiprah and the name of the other Puah). And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.

But the midwives feared God, and did not as the King of Egypt commanded them but saved the men children alive.

And the King of Egypt called for the midwives and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive?

And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women: for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.

Therefore God dealt with the midwives: and the people multiplied and waxed very mighty.

And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses. (Ex. 1:15-21).

The emphasis on God as sole healer, and a male, is one which is repeated throughout the New Testament in accounts of miracles and feats of healing performed by the Son of God.

THE GREEKS: SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

The Greek contribution to the development of medical ideas and attitudes was the establishment of the criteria for scientific and medical ideas and discoveries. Although the Greeks were not as dogmatic as the Hebrews on the form medicine should take, the criteria laid down by the Hippocratic ‘school’ of medicine came to dominate, through its adoption by the Romans, all subsequent Western medical thought.

The Dorian invasions of the second millennium BC introduced into classical Greek culture the Indo-European God Dyaus Pitar, who became known in Greece as Zeus and in Rome as Jupiter. And – as in Egypt – male healing deities began to arise. However,

… while the feminine Gods were generally gentle, sympathetic and careful not to injure mortals, the most powerful gods were masculine and far more often angry, resentful, harmful and cruel than their consorts. 16

Indeed, the most famous of the healing gods was Aesculapius, the son of Apollo. According to legend, he had several children, all of whom became doctors. Homer mentions only his sons as healing the battle wounds of Troy, while Pindar (520-440 BC) says of one of his sons:

Each of his several bane he cured;

This felt the charm’s enchanting sound;

That drank th’elixir’s soothing cup;

Some with soft hands in sheltering bands be bound

Or plied the searching steel and bade the lame leap up. 17

Aesculapius also had two daughters, Hygeia and Panacea (now, interestingly, household words for the maintenance of health), and it is significant that their role in medicine is largely ignored or forgotten. From about the seventh century BC, Hygeia is rarely seen alone in her representations. Usually she is depicted introducing patients to Aesculapius, or administering treatment on his advice. Occasionally she is seen with a snake, and often with a basket of herbs, but she is always modest and beautiful. This is a symbolic representation of the ideal, if not the actual, position of women within Greek medicine at that time. For among the early Greeks the social position of women and their place in medical care was actually more central. As Jacquetta Hawkes points out, the lowly position of women in classical Greece was greatly exaggerated by the ‘bias of nineteenth-century scholarship’; she suggests that in classical Greece

just as in Crete, women shared the power of the Goddess both psychologically and socially; priestesses were of high standing and priestly associations of women were formed round temples and holy places. There was an influential one, for example, associated with the famous temple of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus. 18

Even Homer, who praised Aesculapius’ sons, mentions that Helen as ‘healer outweighs many others in value’, and that Agamede ‘understood as many drugs as the wide earth flourishes’, for she was the daughter of Augeas of Elis

Agamede, with the golden hair,

A leech was she, and well she knew

All herbs that on ground that grew.

(Iliad XI 739-745)

Virgil, in the Aeneid, (1,83) tells that Medea, the wife of Jason who won the golden fleece, knew magic and could cure insanity. In Homer’s time, however, the tradition of Aesculapius and male medicine was strong and the connections between Greek and Egyptian medicine, particularly in the fields of anatomy and surgery, well established.

From Paeon sprung their patron god imparts

To all Pharian race his healing arts …

By the time of Hippocrates (460-377 BC) traditional medicine (incorporating both herb lore and religious ritual and practised in the temples primarily by religious functionaries, often women) was coming into serious disrepute, and the more secular practices, as epitomised by the Aesculapian tradition which incorporated surgery and science, were coming into favour. Aristophanes (450-380 BC), Herondas a century later, Euripedes and Socrates all scorned traditional medico-religious practices. The schools of medicine established by Hippocrates in Cos and Larissa were essentially philosophical and speculative, based on reason and logic. The workings of the body were allowed no mystery: they all conformed to logical principles. The main emphasis of the schools was on anatomy and surgery; health was governed by four ‘humours’, or fluids in the body (blood, phlegm, choler and black choler), the relative proportions of which determined physical or mental well-being. Sickness was the result of imbalance within the body.

Although it was the Hippocratic ‘school’ of medicine which came to dominate European medical practice until the eighteenth century, in classical Greece it was one ‘school’ among many. The schools at Cnidos, Rhodes and Cyrene (which all date from about the sixth and fifth centuries BC) were, in their day, as popular. But women were excluded from them, and only the wealthy could afford the treatment which they offered. Temple practices necessarily still continued, not only for those who could not afford the trained physician, but also for those who still believed in religion as a curative agent. Herodotus, for instance, mentions the Aesculapia or health resorts, where many patients went to be cured. Significantly, however, the diagnosis of disease was, even here, in the hands of laymen and priests, even though often based on ‘mystical’ criteria, such as the interpretation of dreams.

Although women were excluded from the medical schools and from temple practice, they continued to play a significant role in healing at home, among the poor and among women. Their skills necessarily relied primarily on herbal knowledge (Aristotle’s wife, Pythias, was a great botanist and Queen Artemesia of the fourth century BC was said to know every herb used in medicine) in conjunction with prayers and incantations. But documentation refers to women mainly in their role as midwives. Greek physicians, such as Hippocrates, and post-Hippocratic writers who taught obstetrics and gynaecology, occasionally credit their knowledge to midwives. Midwifery itself, because it dealt with women and was conducted by women, had low status. Nevertheless, the knowledge that midwives possessed was impressive. Pythagoras’ wife won a debate with Eurphon, a well-known contemporary physician, arguing that a foetus was viable before the seventh month. Pliny records (though without dates) Lais and Sotira, who wrote books on abortions and sterility and Philista, the sister of Pyrrhus (318-272), who was an obstetrix and Victoria the ‘gynecia’. It was the obstetrix who attended births. These women also performed abortions, but qualifications for midwifery were generally skill born of long experience and, as Hurd-Mead records, ‘she cared for the patient for fifteen days after the birth of the baby, which she turned over to a wet-nurse of her own selection, and received her fee on a piece of dry bread’. 19

But in Greek society women healers were placed, by reason of their sex and their methods, outside the intellectual traditions of medicine. For the male medical schools, and above all the Hippocratic school, had begun to formulate not only a procedure for medical investigation but the establishment of hypotheses about the workings of the body based on their experiments and findings. Ironically, these hypotheses became translated into immutable ‘laws’ of nature, and it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they began to be challenged in any rigorous way by official medical practitioners. Yet, because the initial procedure for investigation conformed to certain principles, because it was divorced from religion, and because it was men who had charge of this learning, medicine was believed to have come of age – to have become a science. Those who challenged the new precepts were condemned to obscurity. Pliny, for instance, thought that women healers should be as quiet and inconspicuous as possible so that ‘after they are dead no one would know that they had lived’. Or they were condemned to public trial, like Agnodice, the ‘midwife of Athens’.

Agnodice practised medicine in Athens around the fourth century BC. She wore men’s clothing in her practice and when this was discovered she was accused of practising under false pretences. Her trial, however, became something of a cause célèbre, during which the women of Athens demanded that the judges release her, arguing ‘You are not our husbands, but our enemies if you condemn Agnodice, who saves our lives.’ 20 The judges appear to have bowed to this pressure and released her. Interestingly, among the crimes that Agnodice was purported to have committed was that of abortion. It appears too that she performed successful Caesarian operations. It is likely that her accusers were motivated by professional rivalry, for evidence elsewhere indicates that Agnodice was not the only woman doing such medical work.

THE ROMANS: MEDICINE AND THE RETURN OF RELIGION