I am a historian by
training and I use history to give a reality to my books. I
deliberately don’t fix the books in a specific time or place, but
the subject matter and the details are influenced by my knowledge of
and research into events in history. In this blog I intend sharing
with you some of those “lessons of history.”
In Girl in the
Glass my heroine Judith is warned about the dangers of
becoming a healer. In the second book in the trilogy Love of
Shadows (which I am writing now) she pursues her calling and
puts her life at risk. The subject of the suppression of women
healers over the centuries is a fascinating one.
Up to the 13thcentury
women traditional healers (wisewomen) were practising their arts
throughout Europe relatively without hindrance. Their medicines were
born of traditions handed down through the generations and tested by
use. In addition they were midwives and bonesetters. They were the
only medical help available to most people and they had status in
their communities as a result.
Then in the 14thcentury
things changed. A new medical practitioner was being created – the
university-trained physicians – one whose services were more
expensive and elitist. Not better. The university medical training at
that time was based on Galen’s concepts of the humours and governed
by Christian doctrine. It did not have the empirical approach of the
women healers and was mostly mumbo jumbo. Nevertheless the new male
(nearly all universities were closed to women) physicians, supported
by the Church, pushed for and got laws forbidding the practice of
medicine by non-university trained healers. Suddenly women could not
legally practice medicine. Of course given the low numbers of
university medical students, these laws were unenforceable across the
board, but they could be applied selectively.
The first targets were
not the peasant women healers, but literate urban women healers who
were in direct competition for the male physicians. In 1322 Jacoba
Felice was put on trial in Paris – her crime practising medicine
illegally. No matter that she produced witnesses verifying that she
had cured them where the university physicians had failed, her
competence was evidence of guilt.
The court found that:
“Her plea that she cured many
sick persons whom the aforesaid masters could not cure, ought not to
stand and is frivolous, since it is certain that a man approved in
the aforesaid art could cure the sick better than any woman
- Perhaps the true reason for her prosecution and other women like her can be found in
- Her accuser was a university-trained male physician.
One witness Jean St
Omer stated that Jacoba had visited him repeatedly throughout a grave
illness, never asking for payment prior to a cure. He affirmed
that she had done more for him, and with far less demand on his
purse, than any licensed physician. As her punishment
Jacoba was excommunicated and fined. Nothing more is known of her. In
some ways she was lucky, from then on the suppression of women
healers started to a more deadly turn. More of that in a future post.
