The Church Had Little to Offer (Erin Jean Warde)
Today I’ll be finishing my deep dive into an amazing text—Witches, Midwives and Nurses a History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English—and our October focus!
The Church Had Little to Offer
Friends,
Today I’ll be finishing my deep dive into an amazing text—Witches, Midwives and Nurses a History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English—and if you’re new, you can explore part 1 here. This will also be my last post in our October Spiral focused on Witch Hunts: Ancient & Modern!
I shared last week about how the history of “witches” is inextricably tied to the work of healing, misogyny, and classism. This week I’d like to address more of the Church’s actions and one of my favorite topics: harm reduction. I admit that this will be a little bit more about my Christian beliefs, but I want to clarify that I never wish to push my faith on anyone. If anything, I’m hoping to name the sins of the Church and how the Church—in this context—strayed deeply from what I believe to be the witness and ministry of Jesus in scripture.
To set the stage: the people who were tried as witches were often offering healing services (including obstetrics!) to peasants who could not afford the medical care they needed. Some even believe the “witch hunts” were a response to a peasant revolt, which would make sense. If people begin to complain about their very real and valid concerns, why actually meet their needs when you can instead label them witches and have them burned at the stake? Of course the problem is not just the classism here, but the way in which the Church took the elitist stance—even though the gospels command Christians to do otherwise.
Ehrenreich and English write (all quotes in today’s blog come from this text and will be shared in block text):
“The Church itself had little to offer the suffering peasantry:
On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores, crying for help–and words were all they got: ‘You have sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank him; you will suffer so much the less torment in the life to come. Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers for the dead?’
(Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft)”
A problem I continue to see in the Church—and I say this as a priest!—is the focus on intellectualizing and spiritualizing the struggles in front of us, rather than addressing them. Please understand: theology and spirituality are vitally important to me. Vitally. And also: my theology and spiritual practice must call me to offer care to the struggle in front of me, because my theology and spiritual practice is founded on the witness of Jesus Christ. The Church, in the face of a suffering peasantry, chose to ignore the needs of those beloved children of God. The Church, in the face of a suffering peasantry, chose to say prayers over them, then see to it that the only medical care they could receive would be burned at the stake. There is nothing Christlike to be found here.
It actually begs the question: Who is committing the harm here?
“Confronted with a sick person, the university trained physician had little to go on but superstition. Bleeding was a common practice, especially in the case of wounds. Leeches were applied according to the time, the hour, the air, and other similar considerations… Incantations and quasi-religious rituals were thought to be effective: The physician to Edward II, who held a bachelors degree in theology and a doctorate in Medicine from Oxford, prescribed for toothache writing on the jaws of the patient, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,’ or touching a needle to a caterpillar and then to the tooth. A frequent treatment for leprosy was a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.
Such was the state of medical ‘science’ at the time when witch healers were persecuted for being practitioners of ‘magic.’ It was witches who developed an executive understanding of bones and muscles, herbs and drugs…
In the witch-hunts, the Church explicitly legitimized 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.)
… the witch craze provided a handy excuse for the doctor’s failings in everyday practice: Anything he couldn’t cure was obviously the result of sorcery.”
So not only were people—predominantly women—being charged as witches because they were offering healing to a group of people fully disenfranchised by the medical system… but the “qualified” doctors were basing their “medical practice” largely on superstitions? And writing prayers on a jaw?
So the “qualified” doctors were basing their “medical practice” on… what might as well be understood as spells and sorcery?
“Many of the herbal remedies developed by witches still have their place in modern pharmacology. They had pain-killers, digestive aids and anti-inflammatory agents. They used ergot for the pain of labor at a time when the Church held that pain in labor was the Lord’s just punishment for Eve’s original sin. Ergot derivatives are the principal drugs used today to hasten labor and aid in the recovery from childbirth. Belladonna–still used today as an anti-spasmodic–was used by the witch healers to inhibit uterine contractions when miscarriage threatened. Digitalis, still an important drug in treating heart ailments, is said to have been discovered by an English witch.”
So not only can we say that the “qualified” doctors were essentially practicing sorcery (you cannot tell me that writing a prayer on a jaw isn’t sorcery! that is sorcery! no snake broth for me, thanks!), but the so-called “witches” were offering treatments that, to this day, inform some medical practices and medicine used? And all the way back in this era, so-called “witches” knew people going through childbirth shouldn’t have to suffer due to a biblical interpretation?
This pursuit of “witches” was offered not as a way to help the people—because if that was the case, care for the peasant population would have mattered—but instead to uphold patriarchy.
And the Church existed as a very important player within this pursuit.
“The distinction between ‘female’ superstition and ‘male’ medicine was made final by the very roles of the doctor and the witch at the trial. The trial in one stroke established the male physician on a moral and intellectual plane vastly above the female healer he was called to judge. It placed him on the side of God and Law, a profession on par with lawyers and theologians, while it placed her on the side of darkness, evil and magic. He owed his new status not to medical or scientific achievements of his own, but to the Church and State he served so well…
In terms of medical skills and theory, the so-called ‘regulars’ had nothing to recommend them over the lay practitioners. Their ‘formal training’ meant little even by European standards of the time: Medical programs varied in length from a few months to two years; many medical schools had no clinical facilities; high school diplomas were not required for admission to medical schools. Not that serious academic training would have helped much anyway–there was no body of medical science to be trained in. Instead, the ‘regulars’ were taught to treat most ills by ‘heroic’ measures: massive bleeding, huge doses of laxatives, calomel (a laxative containing mercury) and, later, opium… There is no doubt these ‘cures’ were often either fatal or more injurious than the original disease…
The lay practitioners were undoubtedly safer and more effective than the ‘regulars.’ They preferred mild herbal medications, dietary changes and hand-holding to heroic interventions. Maybe they didn’t know any more than the ‘regulars,’ but at least they were less likely to do the patient harm. Left alone, they might well have displaced the ‘regular’ doctors with even middle class consumers in time. But they didn’t know the right people. The ‘regulars,’ with their close ties to the upper class, had legislative clout. By 1830, 13 states had passed medical licensing laws outlawing ‘irregular’ practice and establishing the ‘regulars’ as the only legal healers.”
As many of you know, harm reduction has deeply informed my work in the recovery space. It’s vital to me that we not just look at the world with a spirit of “fixing it” (because I’m not sure the complexities of life lend themselves to a “fix”), but instead to look into the world and ask how we can reduce harm.
And I believe this is also the calling of Christians.
I don’t have to know much to know that so-called witches offered better medical care than many doctors, because the type of care they offered provided less opportunity for side effects, including death.
Now, when it comes to medical help, we all take risks—risks are part of life and they include side effects—but the “qualified” doctors were not inviting people into the type of risks that might result in wellness. Instead, they chose “heroic measures” (no doubt informed by the hypermasculinity of the industry at the time) over more gentle ways to offer support.
Something possibly interesting about me is that many months ago, I started studying herbalism. I had to take a huge pause this summer and fall, but I’m hoping to get myself back into the headspace to start my herbalism studies again. I say this to say: I know for a fact those gentle, loving herbal treatments still exist today. And yes, there are side effects, but my still very limited knowledge of herbalism confirms: the side effects of most herbs are gentle. Even my antidepressant (which I will keep taking, by the way, because I believe in both herbalism and modern medicine) has far more high-risk side effects than any herbal treatment I’ve tried. Period.
The so-called witches were onto something. They had skills, ways to offer true healing to the world, and that’s what got them killed. The issue wasn’t that they were sorcerers—the “regular” doctors were doing enough of that—the issue was that they had power, they had skills, they knew how to care for people.
And patriarchy and classism hate when the peasants have power.
This is exactly why, if we claim Christianity, we must remember the words of the Magnificat—that prophetic word from a marginalized pregnant woman—that reminds us that God’s vision for the world, God’s hope for a Kingdom, includes casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. God’s vision for a Kingdom seeks to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty.
When it comes to the trials, we know where much of the Church landed, which grieves me deeply. And yet, there is no doubt in my mind that, in those days of violence and death, Jesus was found on the stake, burning alongside those who tried to heal.
Because the story of Jesus is the story of a prophet born into a life of peasantry, who died by capital punishment because he dared to preach that the peasants were made in the image of God and deserving of healing, too.
With care,
EJW
P.S. As always, would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! <3
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