“By the study, experimentation and practice of natural healing, women are changing and charting the future of health care. Despite heavy resistance or lack of recognition from patriarchal medicine, they are nevertheless making positive changes that will continue and increase. Women’s emphasis on one-to-one work practiced in mutual agreement and participation is very different from mechanized and big-money medicine, and has results and successes far beyond expectations. The emphasis on self-healing returns health care to the consumer, to women’s lives and bodies, for the first time in centuries. The medical system cannot control a movement held in the hands of women, though it may try. Women are taking control again of healing, our daughter-right, for the first time since the matriarchies and the Inquisition.”—from the Introduction

This groundbreaking work examines the role of women in the Western healing traditions. Drawing on the disciplines of history, anthropology, botany, archaeology, and the behavioral sciences, Jeanne Achterberg discusses the ancient cultures in which women worked as independent and honored healers; the persecution of women healers in the witch hunts of the Middle Ages; the development of midwifery and nursing as women's professions in the nineteenth century; and the current role of women and the state of the healing arts, as a time of crisis in the health-care professions coincides with the reemergence of feminine values.

In Women as Healers, thirteen contributors explore the intersection of feminist anthropology and medical anthropology in eleven case studies of women in traditional and emergent healing roles in diverse parts of the world. In a spectrum of healing roles ranging from family healers to shamans, diviner-mediums, and midwives, women throughout the world pursue strategic ends through healing, manipulate cultural images to effect cures and explain misfortune, and shape and are shaped by the social and political contexts in which they work. In an introductory chapter, Carol Shepherd McClain traces the evolution of ideas in medical anthropology and in the anthropology of women that have both constrained and expanded our understanding of the significance of gender to healing-one of the most fundamental and universal of human activities. The contributors include Carol Shepherd McClain, Ruthbeth Finerman, Carolyn Nordstrom, Carole H. Browner, William Wedenoja, Marjery Foz, Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, Laurel Kendall, Merrill Signer, Roberto Garcia, Edward C. Green, Carolyn Sargent, and Margaret Reid.

Women have always been healers -- from the priestess healers in the temples of Isis, to the hedge-witches and herbalists of medieval times, to the physicians, researchers, and alternative practitioners of today. This glorious book celebrates the history of women healers from earliest times to the present. It includes profiles of women healers from all traditions. Some are well known, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Florence Nightingale, and Mary Baker Eddy. Others deserve to be more widely recognized, such as Trotula of Salerno, who wrote gynecological and obstetrical texts in thirteenth-century Italy, and Mama Lola, a respected mambo or healing priestess in the Haitian Voodoo tradition. Text and pictures detail the many contributions of women to the healing arts, from the founding of nursing orders and the tending of soldiers, to the establishment of public health hospitals, to contemporary applications of the ancient lore of herbal medicine and therapeutic touch.

Offering a provocative reconstruction of the history of women's healing practices, Brooke argues that the medieval image of the healer as witch was deliberately constructed by Church officials to discredit women's powers. In its place she provides a more accurate picture of these innovative, compassionate, and capable practitioners.

This book, the first to describe women medical practitioners other than midwives in the colonial period, emphasizes that medical care was part of every woman's work. The Healer's Calling uses memorable anecdotes, engaging characters, and medical oddities to tell the fascinating story of the practice of household medicine in early America. Rebecca J. Tannenbaum points out that housewives provided much of the medical care available in the seventeenth century. Elite women cared for the indigent in their towns and used medical practice to make influential connections with powerful men; "doctresses" or "doctor women" supported themselves with their practices and competed directly with male physicians; and midwives were crucial "expert witnesses" in cases of fornication, murder, and witchcraft. Yet there were limits to the authority of women's healing communities, with consequences for those who overstepped the bounds. By setting women's practice in the context of contemporary medicine, gender roles, and community norms, Tannenbaum also reveals the relationship between women's medical practice and witchcraft accusations. Tannenbaum examines colonial America's full range of medical options--including the work of classically trained male doctors and male lay practitioners--with a keen eye to the interactions and tensions between men and women in the realm of healing.

'Women Healing/ Healing Women' begins with a search for women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period. Women healers were honoured in inscriptions and named by medical writers, and were familiar enough to be stereotyped in plays and other writings. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era is a world in which women functioned as healers but where healing becomes a contested site for gender relations. By the time the gospels are written the place of women as healers is effectively erased. The book uses the historical and cultural evidence to re-read the gospel texts and discover healers in a woman pouring out ointment, healed women bearing on their bodies the language describing Jesus, and even in women possessed by demons.