"When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil."
                                                               Malleus Maleficarum, 1486

Medical professions display striking and significant evidence of gender biases. Developed
economies face a much lower average earnings of female healthcare workers relative to men.
The current scenario is improving for female professionals, where the pay gap has reduced to
28%. However, out of a modest 70% of women employed in this sphere, a majority accrues to
nurses and midwifery, and men take up the high end jobs of surgery and pharmacy. The share of
women in such high paying jobs fall with respect to age, from around 70% to 30%. The same
cannot be said for midwifery, where the numbers show a spike. Throughout the course of history,
women have been traditional healers, physicians, and pharmacists. Barred from actual scientific
enquiry and literacy, they have been associated with being the “people’s doctor”. Decades of
political and economic monopolization of the medical space has suppressed women healers. This
subservience is also fueled by ignorance, and this ignorance is enforced. The women's health
movement of today has ancient roots in medieval covens. One can deconstruct these
developments with three major events, namely the emergence of European medical profession,
the subsequent onslaught of witch – hunts, and what followed after 18 th Century Capitalism.

Figures such as the Oracle at Delphi in the 8 th Century BC and Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen
of New Orleans have served the role of healers and mystics, often catering to the peasantry. They
represented the lower classes as their doctors. The witch healer was an empiricist. She relied not
on established and recorded scientific observations, but on her own senses and methods of trial
and error. The Church and the clergy’s anti-empiricism was well renowned for burning
inconsistencies in their subjects. The persecution of women as healers created a new class of
male healers, protected and under the patronage of the ruling class. Periods of witch hunts that
ensued coincide with peasant uprisings and revolts by the lower classes. They were legalized
ordeals and campaigns financed under the eye of the Church and State. Women were suppressed
and dehumanized in the name of holy order. A lasting effect of these hunts have reduced the aura
of the female healer to that of inhuman contamination and evil.

The systematic exclusion of women starts with the political and religious influence of the clergy.
The crimes of the witch included sins such as blasphemy, insubordination, heresy and lewdness.
Moreover, they were indicted of all possible sexual crimes against men, they were “accused” of
their sexuality. The Church associated women with sex. Women were perceived as initiators of
sexual pleasures, which was condemned as a sin, something that could come from the Devil.
Documented records show meetings (Sabbath) of witches who convened with the Devil, often
transformed as a goat, who would engage in copulation. Even in the eyes of the Church, evil
could only be thought of as male-directed. The political significance of such meetings as a form
of communication in peasant uprisings is thus dissolved and replaced by religious attacks.
Prayers and transubstantiation were Church-sanctioned, but magic charms and herbal remedies
were not. Believed to be demonic, the peasant healer was hence, a grave danger to Christian
authority. The healer’s remedies still relevant today as pain killers, anti-inflammatory agents, and
digestive aids, was removed from all comprehensibility at a time when the Church believed in
labor during childbirth as a punishment for Eve’s original sin.

The publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, literally the “Hammer of the Witches” in 1486 found
its way in courtrooms that held trials against witchcraft. The book contained a theological theory
and handbook for identifying and dealing with witches. What followed is nothing short of
targeted pogroms and mass extermination, with numbers ranging from 60,000 – 100,000 in
medieval Europe. The emergence of university – trained physicians and medicine as a secular
profession preceded the witch craze. Trials had doctors as a medical witness, to provide an aura
of science to the court. Of course, such educational institutions under the trust of the capitalists
and their religious complement isolated the witch healer. The educated doctor was accompanied
by a priest who conferred advice for treating patients. Under training, students had compulsory
curricula of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, the ancient Roman physician who stressed the theory of
“complexions” or “temperaments” of men. Under the Catholic doctrine, the endorsement of
Christian incantations found its way into physiology. Treatments often looked into the cure of
the disease, not the cause. At a time when the witch had possessed vast treatises of herbal cures,
the doctor treated leprosy with a “broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land
among stones.” Anything incurable was sorcery. Subsequent developments include licensing
laws that limited the reach of knowledge and research in medicine only to a select few. The
Church explicitly legitimized the doctors’ professionalism: “If a woman dare to cure without
having studied, she is a witch and must die”. Nonprofessional male practitioners – “barber-
surgeons” - flooded the profession 18 th Century onwards owing to their superior skills in
obstetrical forceps, replacing women altogether as assistants or substitutions for the peasant
class.

20 th Century philosophers and historians have made significant efforts in identifying the
mechanisms of authority that have shaped our perspective of living. Knowledge/Power structures
underlying such systems and apparatuses of control and subordination provide useful insights
into the way we interpret meaning from text. Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic underlines the
aforementioned events with wide-eyed accuracy, where his theory of the “medical gaze”
resonates in contemporary medicine, where the doctor established so far looks at a patient as an
anatomical structure, away from his temperament and emotional skeleton. The workings of the
State are highlighted by the principles of bio power, an intricate web of socio-economic
conditions that have shaped and established the dogmas we face today. A critique of such
structures is necessary to gain equity in employment opportunities and to ensure prudent policy-
making. The nurse is idealized Woman, and the doctor is a Man – amalgamating intellect and
action, abstract theory and hard-headed pragmatism. Her innate spirituality expels her from
linear science. His endorsed and endowed curiosity makes him unfit for patient nursing.
Understanding the implicit institutionalization of male upper class monopoly over elitist and
exclusive professionalism is crucial to separate it from expertise, which must be independent of
fluid normativity.

References
1. The Malleus Maleficarum,  Heinrich Kramer, Jacob Sprenger, 1486
2. Gender inequalities in the medical profession: are there still barriers to women physicians in the 21st
century?, Arrizabalaga P., et al., Gacita Sanitaria Vol. 8 Issue 5, September-October 2014
3. Gender equity in the health workforce: analysis of 104 countries, Boniol M., et al., WHO, March 2019
4. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, Barbara Ehrenreich, 1972,
ISBN-10: 0904665003