“The doctor knows best.” He is the shaman, in touch with the forbidden, mystically complex world of Science which we have been taught is beyond our grasp. Nurses are taught not to question, not to challenge. Our subservience is reinforced by our ignorance, and our ignorance is enforced. From the nurses’ aide, whose menial tasks are spelled out with industrial precision, to the “professional” nurse, who translates the doctors’ orders into the aide’s tasks, nurses share the status of a uniformed maid service to the dominant male professionals. And nurses of every rank from aide up are just “ancillary workers” in relation to the doctors (from the Latin ancilla, maid servant). When we are allowed to participate in the healing process, we can do so only nurses. We are, for the most part, institutional fixtures, filling faceless job slots: clerk, dietary aide, technician, maid. We are no longer independent practitioners, known by our own names, for our own work. Women are still in the overall majority – 70 percent of health workers are women – but we have been incorporated as workers into an industry where the bosses are men. Ninety-three percent of the doctors in the US are men and almost all the top directors and administrators of health institutions. Today, however, health care is the property of male professionals. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.
They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were abortionists, nurses and counsellors. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history. First Published: in 1973 by The Feminist Press at CUNY.
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