Witches, Midwives & Nurses : A History of Women Healers

Women and the Rise of the American Medical Profession

61 Women฀and฀the฀Rise฀ of฀the฀American฀ Medical฀Profession in the us the male takeover of healing roles started later than in England or France, but ultimately went much further. There is probably no industrialized country with a lower percentage of women doctors than the Us today: England has 24 percent; russia has 75 percent; the Us has only 7 percent. and while midwifery—female midwifery—is still a thriving occupation in scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the netherlands , etc., it has been virtually outlawed here since the early twentieth century. By the turn of the century, medicine here was closed to all but a tiny minority of necessarily tough and well-heeled women. What was left was nursing, and this was in no way a substitute for the autonomous roles women had enjoyed as midwives and general healers. 62 The question is not so much how women got “left out” of medicine and left with nursing, but how did these categories arise at all? To put it another way: how did one particular set of healers, who happened to be male, white, and middle class, manage to oust all the competing folk healers, midwives, and other practitioners who had dominated the american medical scene in the early 1800s? The conventional answer given by medical historians is, of course, that there always was one true american medical profession—a small band of men whose 63 scientific and moral authority flowed in an unbroken stream from hippocrates, galen, and the great European medical scholars. in frontier america these doctors had to combat, not only the routine problems of sickness and death, but the abuses of a host of lay practitioners—usually depicted as women, ex-slaves, indians, and drunken patent medicine salesmen. Fortunately for the medical profession, in the late nineteenth century the american public suddenly developed a healthy respect for doctors’ scientific knowledge, outgrew its earlier faith in quacks, and granted the true medical profession a lasting monopoly of the healing arts. But the real answer is not in this made-up drama of science versus ignorance and superstition. it’s part of the nineteenth century’s long story of class and sex struggles for power in all areas of life. When women had a place in medicine, it was in a people’s medicine. When that people’s medicine was destroyed, there was no place for women—except in the subservient role of nurses. The set of healers who became the medical profession was distinguished not so much by its associations with modern science as by its associations with the emerging american business establishment. With all due respect to Pasteur, Koch, and the other great European medical researchers of the nineteenth 64 century, it was the carnegies and rockefellers who intervened to secure the final victory of the american medical profession. The Us in 1800 could hardly have been a more unpromising environment for the development of a medical profession, or any profession, for that matter. Few formally trained physicians had emigrated here from Europe. There were very few schools of medicine in america and very few institutions of higher learning altogether. The general public, fresh from a war of national liberation, was hostile to professionalism and “foreign” elitisms of any type. in Western Europe, university-trained physicians already had a centuries’ old monopoly over the right to heal. But in america, medical practice was traditionally open to anyone who could demonstrate healing skills—regardless of formal training, race, or sex. ann hutchinson, the dissenting religious leader of the 1600s, was a practitioner of “general physik,” as were many other ministers and their wives. The medical historian Joseph Kett reports that “one of the most respected medical men in late eighteenth century Windsor, connecticut, for example, was a freed negro called ‘Dr. Primus.’ in new Jersey, medical practice, except in extraordinary cases, was mainly in the hands of women as late as 1818 . . . ” 65 Women frequently went into joint practices with their husbands: The husband handling the surgery, the wife the midwifery and gynecology, and everything else shared. Or a woman might go into practice after developing skills through caring for family members or through an apprenticeship with a relative or other established healer. For example, harriet hunt, one of america’s first trained female doctors, became interested in medicine during her sister’s illness, worked for a while with a husband-wife “doctor” team, then simply...