In Germany and Scotland, in the sixteenth century, midwives were burned alive for easing the pain of childbirth. The ostensible reason was that the pain was God's punishment for Original Sin, and so to interfere with it was heretical, causing great pain and hurt to Our Saviour (fascism is always maudlin). The real reason was that these shamans challenged the psycho-medical monopoly of the military-industrial theocracy.

Puritan Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts plainly asserted as much in 1648, explaining why Margaret Jones had to be hanged: "she practising physic, and her medicines being such things as (by her own confession) were harmless, as aniseed, liquors, etc., yet had extraordinarily violent effects." Other accusations included an understanding "beyond the apprehension of all physicians and surgeons" and "some things which she foretold came to pass accordingly; other things she could tell of (as secret speeches, etc.) which she had not ordinary means to come to the knowledge of."  She sounds like a powerful shaman.

"Pregnancy," declared Dr. John Vaughan of Delaware, was "a diseased state" requiring - guess what - bleeding, emetics and cathartics, that is, chemical poisons. That was the overwhelming regular medical opinion taught in the schools and advocated by the leading regular physicians of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Evory Kennedy, in the Lying-In Hospital in Dublin, prescribed "tartar emetic," antimony and potassium, for hundreds of women as a substitute for the official ergot to "relax the pelvic muscles," which it did by causing violent vomiting, something no midwife in her right mind would ever consider; it also, incidentally, poisoned the baby and prolonged the labor, the exact opposite of what ergot does. Antimony and potassium are so poisonous that they are used today as insecticides. Kennedy's procedures were brought across the Atlantic.

Due to the lack of aseptic conditions in many hospitals, something called "child-bed fever," rare in home births, killed thousands of infants. Semmelweiss demonstrated in the 1860's that this was due to the exposure of the new-borns to the contagious diseases in the hospital, but asepsis and segregation weren't effectively practiced in most hospitals until the 1900's. There were some famous exceptions, like New York Maternity Hospital, but well into the twentieth century many hospitals treated new mothers to a high incidence of infant death and serious uterine infections.

The very worst of the patent medicines contained the metallic and mineral poisons that were, or had been, official with the regular doctors. These included Chloro-Phosphide of Arsenic, Sulphur Compound Lozenges and Storey's [calomel] Worm Cakes. "Calomel" is mercurous chloride, mercury and chlorine, the toxic metal found in thermometers and the mineral base of WW I's poison gases and many insecticides. De Valagin's Mineral Solution was arsenious acid in dilute hydrochloric acid, and Donovan's was iodide of arsenic and mercury; strychnine was also popular.

Obviously, the best of the regular physicians, and there were many, bitterly opposed bleeding and poisoning. Robert Bentley Todd, in the 1850's, treated his patients to the traditional roast beef, brandy and opium, without the poison, and no doubt did a great deal of good, but not nearly as much as an experienced herbalist could do. Bleeding and poisoning lost ground as American pharmacology became more sophisticated, and that sophistication was due largely to Native American herbalism, popularized over-the-counter. As Bourke's old comrade Buffalo Bill proved, the reputation and mystique of Native America was worth a fortune back East. Below, Bill with Sitting Bull, who liked the medicine-show man.



Doc Healy and Texas Charlie Bigelow's Indian Medicine Company, in the 1880's, had seventy-five Indian stage shows on the road at one time. They peddled Kickapoo Oil, Kickapoo Salve, Kickapoo Cough Cure and Indian Prairie Plant for Female Complaints.

Today's prohibitionist cliché is that this was all bunk, an empty hussle. The actual fact is that many of these patent medicines were sophisticated herbal recipes. Kickapoo Oil was a masterpiece of composition; it contained ether, camphor, capsicum, clove oil, sassafras oil and myrrh. It smelled sweet, tingled going on, felt hot, and got you good and happy, which is the best, usually, that the regular docs could do with most complaints; the soothing salve did a lot more good than harm.

In these days before regulation, of course, many patent medicines were worse than useless, especially those containing the chemical poisons of the regulars. Few of the herbal medicines were dangerous, but virtually all made absurd claims and refused to reveal their ingredients.



The most famous of the bracers was Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound For Female Complaints. Due to constant advertising and massive sales, it was said that, aside from Queen Victoria, Lydia Pinkham was the most famous woman of the nineteenth century.   

Although a commercial superstar in later life, Lydia did indeed originally compound her compound on her Massachusetts farm. Her formula, diffused in 18% alcohol, included gentian, black cohosh, unicorn root, liferoot, pleurisy root, dandelion, chamomile, licorice and Jamaica dogwood.  All had been official or semi-official in in the U.S. Pharmacopeia or the U.S. Dispensatory for various female ills.



A 1958 chemical analysis confirmed the estrogen content and the quality of the herbal extracts. So far from being bunkum, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was probably the best female tonic on the market, although Lydia did go a bit overboard in claiming to cure all female ills, and in advising customers to "write Mrs. Pinkham," avoid doctors altogether and just guzzle Compound.

At the turn of the century 75% of the births in St. Louis were home births attended by midwives, and in Chicago the figure was 86%. 78% of Maryland's midwives were Black. Not only was culture a factor, but the midwives' nominal fee, usually $15, including follow-up visits, was deeply resented by many regulars.

The first federal drug law in American history is aimed specifically at midwives, and the zeitgeist and legal language come straight out of the Inquisition. A sanctimonious Connecticut Congregationalist named Anthony Comstock joined the New York City YMCA's campaign against obscenity in 1868. Financed by powerful Puritan merchants and supported by leading Doctors of Divinity, Comstock was appointed to head the Y-connected New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

In 1873 Comstock engineered An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use - "The Comstock Law": "That whoever...shall sell...or in any manner exhibit...or shall have in his possession...any obscene book, pamphlet...or other representation...or any cast, instrument or otherarticle of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine...for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale...shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor...and on conviction thereof, he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense..." Comstock was made a special agent of the Post Office Department with the power to open the mail. His New York Society served as an army of private deputies.

Comstock's language and asumptions can all be found in the Malleus Maleficarum, the official handbook of the medieval Inquisition. As Pope Innocent VIII put it, in 1484, in pharmaco-shamanic language, "...applying potent remedies to prevent the disease of heresy and other turpitudes diffusing their poison to the destruction of many innocent souls..." Does that sound like the Drug War to you? "Drug" "addiction" is a "plague," an "epidemic," a "scourge" of "poison"; all that comes straight out of the Malleus Maleficarum, which admits it's all really a "turpitude."

In 1878 Comstock went to Madame Restell, a famous Cockney midwife established at 52nd & 5th in Manhattan for years. Although she was 67 and retired, she took pity on Comstock, who entrapped her by posing as a distraught husband whose hysterical wife was unable to sustain yet another pregnancy. On receiving medication, Comstock made his drug bust and threw the old lady in the Tombs. Facing a certain five years at hard labor, the distraught old woman cut her own throat. Comstock proudly told the papers she was the fifteenth midwife he had driven to suicide.

Comstock's last case was his most famous. In 1915 he arrested Margaret Sanger, below, for publishing her own magazine, Woman Rebel ("No Gods, No Masters"), which dealt explicitly with female medicine, sexual repression, labor organization and strike tactics. She was charged on nine counts of obscenity, a possible 45-year sentence.



When Sanger got specific about gonorrhea, The Call was banned from the mails: "It was at this time that I began to realize that Anthony Comstock was alive and active. His stunted, neurotic nature and savage methods of attack had ruined thousands of women's lives. He had indirectly caused the death of untold thousands. He and a weak-kneed Congress, which, through a trick, in 1873 had given him the power of an autocrat, were directly responsible for the deplorable condition of a whole generation of women left physically damaged and spiritually crippled from the results of abortion. No group of women had yet locked horns with this public enemy. Women in far western states who had fought for the sacred privilege of the ballot and won it years earlier had never raised their voices against the Comstock laws. Their own shallow emotions had not yet grappled with so fundamental an issue as sex."

The shallow women to whom Sanger refers are the doughty prudes of the WCTU and the more prohibitionist-minded of the Suffragettes, whose roots were in the old Rush-inspired Temperance movement. Their anti-sacramentalism was firmly rooted in the Hundred Years War. Insisted Mary Livermore, president of the Massachusetts Union: "no Catholic should hold office in our country whose political allegiance is to the Pope, first. It is high time there was agitation."

Working with Anthony Comstock, the WCTU got obscenity laws in most states which criminalized the teaching of real sexual biology and contraception, even by physicians. They helped Comstock criminalize Sanger. The church ladies even acquiesced when the AMA engineered midwifery licensing tests in most states and then refused to test qualified midwives. Below is the comment of The Masses, September, 1915, "Your honor," says Comstock, "this woman gave birth to a naked child!"