-Caveat Lector-
From: "Johannes Schmidt III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 'Wise Women' etc. were nothing more than the quacks and
>faith healers we have today. There is no evidence that they
>were part of an organised religion or that they worshipped
>any particular non-Christian deity.
Organized or not, those 'wise women' of old were far from 'quacks and faith healers'.
In fact, if you knew
ANYTHING about the history of medicine, you'd know that the term 'quacks and faith
healers' would be more
aptly applied to 'learned' men of 'science' who practiced medicine at the time when
these 'wise women'
practiced their own brand of home-grown doctoring...
There was a good reason most women of reason preferred to give birth at home with
these wise women in
attendance, rather than put the fate of themselves and their soon-to-be-born infants
in the hands of 'learned
men of science' at the local hospital...namely, because most women who gave birth in a
hospital died, as did
their infants. The rate of death was much lower for those women who stayed at home
and entrusted their care
to the ministrations of the local 'wise women'...
The answer lies in good part to the fact that the wise women demanded
cleanliness...they may have cast an aura
of spirituality and ritual about it, but the bottom line was that they were practicing
antiseptic control long
before it became the accepted norm amongst 'learned men of science'. In fact, the
first 'real' doctor who
suggested that doctors should wash their hands between patients was roundly criticized
and hooted by his peers
as believing in 'old wives tales'...
And those old wives also had a knowledge base of pharmaceuticals that later became
synthesized in the 20th
century as standard medicines. One case in point was the practice of boiling the bark
of the White Willow,
and using the tea for aches and pains and inflammations. It was routinely dismissed
for centuries as "an old
wives tale", until a company studied the components of the White Willow tea, decided
the active ingredient was
salycic acid, made a synthetic of it and marketed it in pill form under the name
'aspirin'.
To this day, no one knows why aspirin is as effective as it is (because it hasn't been
worth getting the
funding to mount clinical trials of it), and it probably wouldn't make it to market
today if it didn't benefit
from the 'grandfather' clause written into the government regulations regarding
pharmaceuticals.
Another case in point was the practice of wise women in the British Isles to wash
wounds with a certain
decoction made of local herbs, and then binding the wound with a piece of moldy bread.
This too was dismissed
by 'learned men of science' as an old wives tale, and in fact attempts were made to
discourage it, since these
'learned men' couldn't fathom how putting something 'dirty' like moldy bread on a
wound could be beneficial.
One of these 'learned men' actually DID look at cases treated in such a manner, and
concluded that for some
reason the patients indeed usually recovered nicely, at a much higher rate than
patients with similar wounds
treated in the usual manner by 'learned men of science' at 'respected' hospitals.
But this was in the early 19th century, and this doctor was roundly laughed at by his
colleagues for accepting
unscientific 'old wives tales', instead of sticking to 'known science'...
Later, in the 20th century, it was found that the decoction of herbs these wise women
used had antiseptic
properties, and of course that moldy piece of bread was full of penicillin...
June
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