Witches, Midwives, and Nurses

A brief and resounding argument that the male-dominated medical profession is an recent aberration created by violence in consolidating and support of class power. Emphasis on how expert/evidence/professionalization comes at the end of the process - to start, elite doctors were dangerously uninformed in comparison to folk healers. But the latter's propensity to undermine power and support agitation for class and gender equality movements led to systematic persecution.

Astonishingly good, avoiding all of the traps that feminist writing of this era tends to fall into, and providing a excellent history of the "professionalization" (masculinization) of medicine in the United States.

This book does a excellent job of looking at the interlocking systems of gender, class, and race, and provides a essentially anarchist view of what "professionalization" means and how it operates — focusing on the medical context, but much more broadly applicable. The discussion of Nightingale nursing in particular was excellent — laying bare the class implications of it is a very different history than what I'm used to.

I wish there were more historical sources for some of the claims about witches in particular — while everything they say seems plausible, I would prefer to know thier primary sources.

Highly recommended.