The Women Who Were Called Witches Were Often Just Healers

You have probably heard the story. The women burned as witches were really healers, herbalists and midwives whose knowledge frightened powerful men, and so they were destroyed for it. It is a stirring story, and it carries a real grief. It is also, historians will tell you, only partly true, and the truth sitting underneath it turns out to be stranger, sadder and a good deal more interesting than the legend.

The scale of what happened

Before untangling the legend, it helps to grasp the scale, because it was enormous. Across roughly three centuries of witch trials in Europe and its colonies, historians estimate that somewhere between forty and sixty thousand people were executed, and the great majority of them, perhaps eighty percent, were women. They were hanged, burned and drowned, usually after confessions extracted under torture or the threat of it. A notorious witch-hunting manual published in the late fifteenth century helped fuel the panic and aimed much of its venom squarely at women, casting them as more easily corrupted. This was a catastrophe that fell, overwhelmingly, on women, and that much is not in any dispute.

Where the legend came from

The specific image of the murdered midwife-healer, though, became popular surprisingly recently. It spread widely in the 1970s, carried by an influential feminist account of the history of women healers, and was repeated so often that it hardened into common knowledge. There was real feeling behind it, and a real point being made about how women were later pushed out of medicine, and yet when historians went carefully back to the surviving trial records, the tidy version did not hold. The case for any deliberate, organised campaign against midwives in particular rested on remarkably thin evidence, sometimes on a single misread example copied from one book into the next.

Who was actually accused

So who were the tens of thousands of mostly women caught up in the trials? More often than not they were the poor and the old, women living on the very edges of their communities, widows with no man to protect them, the difficult neighbour, the woman with a sharp tongue and no standing to shield her. A quarrel over a debt or a sick cow could be enough to set a rumour going, and once an accusation took hold it was nearly impossible to escape, since the machinery of the trial was built to produce a confession rather than to test the truth. In some regions midwives were even called as expert witnesses for the prosecution rather than dragged into the dock themselves. The neat claim that they came chiefly for the healers simply does not survive contact with the archives.

The kernel of truth

And yet something real does remain standing once the legend clears, something well worth holding onto. There genuinely was a class of women who held the practical medicine of their day, the cunning folk, the village wise women, the ones you went to when a child burned with fever and there was no physician for a hundred miles and no money to pay one even if there had been. They knew which leaf brought down a fever, which root eased a birth, how to dress a wound and quiet a cough, and their knowledge moved hand to hand, mother to daughter, across the generations. In a world with almost no doctors and no pharmacies, these women were the entire health system for ordinary people. Some of them were indeed swept up in the trials. In parts of New England, by some estimates, healers and midwives made up a real share of those accused, and Margaret Jones, hanged in Massachusetts in 1648, had worked as an independent healer and midwife. The fear of the woman who knew too much was real, even if it was never the whole engine of the panic.

The slower, quieter loss

The deeper story is not a single dramatic purge. It is a long, gradual pushing-out that unfolded over centuries and left far fewer bodies behind. As medicine slowly professionalised, it organised itself around universities and licences that women were simply forbidden to enter, in many countries right up into the nineteenth and even the twentieth century. The midwife who had caught babies for forty years found herself redefined, on paper, as untrained and unqualified. The herbal knowledge of the cottage and the kitchen was reclassified as superstition and old wives' tales, even as some of those very plants were being quietly studied, refined and sold back to the public by the new and almost entirely male profession. Nobody needed to burn that knowledge in the end. It was enough to rename it as ignorance until people stopped bothering to pass it on.

What the plants actually held

Here is the part that history keeps proving. A great deal of that dismissed folk medicine had real teeth. Willow bark, long chewed for pain and fever, carried the active idea behind aspirin. Foxglove, a cottage remedy for a failing heart, became the heart medicine we still call digitalis. The long list of plant compounds that modern pharmacy went on to isolate were found, time and again, in the very plants the wise women had been using all along. They were not working magic over a cauldron. They were practising a slow, inherited, trial-and-error kind of science, and a surprising amount of it genuinely worked.

Why it still matters

We are living through a quiet rediscovery now, as researchers confirm that many traditional remedies were pharmacologically sound, and that the old instincts toward rest, warmth, touch and herbal care were never as foolish as they were made to seem. The witch trials deserve to be remembered for what they truly were, a tragedy that fell hardest on the most vulnerable women, rather than flattened into a satisfying parable about persecuted healers. And the women healers deserve remembering too, not as martyrs in a legend, but as keepers of real, hard-won knowledge that the world spent centuries deciding to forget. That knowledge did not vanish. It went underground, into recipes and remedies and the things grandmothers still somehow know, and a few of us are only now digging it back up.