ABSTRACT
The village woman, skilled in the use of herbs, offering physic to the anxious mother as well as philtres to the love-sick girl, was a part of the rural landscape. Women took a leading part in the magic ritual of medicine, which included decoction of herbs, plantain, mandragora and the sacred mistletoe, fumigation and the massage or manipulation of the patient. The Norman conquest brought to England an established tradition of medicine practised by women from castle to cottage. Ladies were the ordinary practitioners of domestic medicine and the skilled chatelaine could reduce fractures, probe and dress wounds or burns and prepare herbal remedies. Male physicians were rare, since time and desire for study were almost confined to monks, Jews and others debarred from the supreme masculine occupation of fighting. Professional women doctors, trained by apprenticeship to men, by reading medical books and by continual practice in the empiric method, naturally emerged to meet the need.
