What the Trials Removed

There is a widely repeated account in which the European witch trials were a campaign against a surviving tradition of women healers, deliberately conducted to clear the ground for a male medical profession. It is compelling, it appears in a great deal of popular writing, and the evidence does not support most of it.

The archive should say so plainly, because the credibility of everything else here depends on not accepting a congenial claim without checking it.

The historical work on the trials, which is extensive and based on court records rather than on the demonologists' manuals, does not show that the accused were predominantly healers. Accusations most often arose from village conflict: disputes over property, charity refused, livestock or children falling ill after a quarrel. The majority of the accused were women, and in some regions substantial numbers of men were tried. The total across the roughly three centuries of the trials is now generally estimated in the tens of thousands executed rather than the millions still frequently cited.

The figure matters. The nine million figure that circulates originated with an eighteenth-century estimate, was repeated through the nineteenth century, and has no evidentiary basis. Repeating it undermines the real argument.

What can be documented is narrower and still significant. The professionalisation of medicine in the same centuries did progressively exclude unlicensed practitioners, and licensing was closed to women. Physicians' guilds and university faculties prosecuted unlicensed practice, and surviving cases include women charged with practising medicine without qualification. That is a documented exclusion, running on the Hermano Pule mechanism: the door open in principle, closed by a criterion unrelated to competence.

Midwifery is the clearest case and it took longer. Attendance at birth was almost entirely women's work into the eighteenth century. The introduction of instruments, the rise of the man-midwife, and eventually the licensing and hospitalisation of childbirth transferred it, with the older practitioners defined as untrained rather than differently trained.

Whether that transfer improved outcomes is a real question with a complicated answer, and the archive should not pretend otherwise. Instrumental delivery saved lives in obstructed labour. Hospital birth in the era before antisepsis killed a great many women through puerperal fever, at rates far above home birth, which is one of the better documented iatrogenic disasters in medical history.

So the honest version is this. The dramatic story is not supported. The undramatic one is: a body of practical knowledge held by women, transmitted by apprenticeship, largely unwritten, was displaced over two centuries by a licensed profession that excluded them by rule, and because the knowledge was procedural and oral, displacement meant loss rather than transfer.

That is the boats again. Knowledge held in people, transmitted by doing, with a one-generation window. Nobody had to burn anything.

The false version of this story is popular because it has villains. The true version has a licensing board, which is harder to be angry at and considerably more common.