“Do you heal sick persons?” the imposing interrogator asked the frail, aging woman.
“Yes, sir,” replied Gostanza da Libbiano, a 60-year-old nun who practiced as a midwife and healer in Tuscany, Italy. It was 1594 and Gostanza was on trial for witchcraft.
“With what kind of medicines?” he barked.
“By picking betony up and washing it like salad and crushing it into a mortar to get its juice, and to give it to my patients for 3, 4, and 5 days, telling them that the more they drunk it, the better it was,” she responded.
Villagers had accused Gostanza of causing the death of several babies. While she admitted to administering ointments to the women during labor, she denied trying to kill the babies. The betony plant has long oval leaves with wrinkled edges; the tops of its tall stalks burst with crowded clusters of tubular purple flowers. The ancient Greeks revered the plant as more important than clothing and used it to treat 47 different illnesses.
The Franciscan inquistor sentenced Gostanza to torture on the ropes. After being hung by the arms, Gostanza confessed to practicing witchcraft on several patients. She talked of relationships with demons and sucking children’s blood. She said it all started after a devil called Polletto abducted her and took her to infernal sabbaths.
Slated to be burned at the stake, the Florence inquisitor took pity on her and asked her if her confessions were true or if she was just trying to get the torture to stop. Gostanza told him she had made it all up. She was briefly imprisoned and then told to move to another town and swear she would stop practicing medicine. She’d gotten off easier than most.
Wise women could be as feared as they were revered. Since little was known about the science behind why remedies worked or didn’t, it’s understandable that there was believed to be a supernatural element to healing. But it was likely their deep knowledge of herbal remedies, rather than an intimate connection with gods or devils, that helped women be successful healers. Wise women who practiced folk medicine and midwifery were natural targets of suspicion: often spinsters or widows, peasants who needed to work for a living, lady loners already sidelined by society.
The medieval Church disagreed that wise women were doing God’s work. Churches were opening universities, professionalizing medicine to be practiced by book-learned men, so they needed to wipe out the competition. It started off relatively innocently: government-imposed fines and threats of imprisonment or excommunication if caught practicing medicine without a license. When that wasn’t enough to scare them out of their livelihoods, the Catholic and Lutheran churches took things a step further. Between 1400 and 1700, their campaign to eradicate lay healers saw more than 100,000 women in Europe burned at the stake after they were declared to be witches. As Gostanza shows, even nuns weren’t safe from their wrath.
When we wonder why there aren’t more women healers recorded in history books, it’s important to remember that there was a time when practicing medicine as a woman could get you killed; that women risked their lives to heal their neighbors.
Further reading:
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.
Gostanza da Libbiano (Italian film, 2000)
Women Healers of the Middle Ages: Selected Aspects of Their History, American Journal of Public Health, February 1992.
How Medieval Churches Used Witch Hunts to Gain More Followers, History.com, Sept. 1, 2018.
Next week:
A look at the fascinating life of a Black and Native American woman whose cancer research proved crucial to the eventual development of the Pap smear. Her father was born a slave and her mother was a housekeeper for THE Tiffany family.
More about me:
Pre-order my book: Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine, out March 2, 2021 from HarperCollins/Park Row Books.
What is the name of this book? Is it your book? :
I don't know of Olivia Campbell will see this Oct 31, 2022. I read a book in 1976-1983 that talked about women healers in western Europe as healers, being accused to be witches and killed. The 3 parts I rememberer were: 1) As anesthesia became new with male doctors, the rich & doctors wanted to get rid of women healers, midwives; 2) Women gathered herbs and nuts for healing in the forests; the sheep herder rich wanted to clear cut the forests and did create large areas of grazing meadows instead of the forests where the women gathered their medicines; and 3) When a husband died, the wife owned the house; the rich wanted these houses; called the widow a witch, had a trial, and killed the woman and took her home, often leaving 1 woman alive in a whole small village...
What is the name of this book? Is it your book? Is it still in print? I thought it was Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (1st Edition): A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, but I know the book was longer than 48 page pamphlet thanks so much for any help finding this book. Etana in Florida