Women have always been healers, and medicine has always been an arena of struggle between female lay practitioners and male professionals. This work explores two important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of 'witches' in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in the United States.
A sequel to Witches, Midwives, and Nurses , this work documents the tradition of American sexism in medicine before and after the turn of the century. Citing numerous 'treatments' and 'rest cures' perpetrated on women through the decades, it analyzes the biomedical rationales used to justify sex discrimination.