On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

Wise women were themselves susceptible to superstition, but as far back as the early middle ages they used ergot to speed contractions and belladonna to prevent miscarriage. Saint Hildegarde of Bingen cataloged the healing properties of 213 medicinal plants, and women lay healers knew of recipes for effective painkillers and anti-inflammatories at a time when physicians were still writing prayers on the jaws of their patients to heal toothaches. Benjamin Rush, one of the fathers of American medicine, bled his patients to, as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English put it, “Transylvanian excesses.” In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, patients were bled to a faint, dosed with mercury, and blistered with mustard plasters. While medical schools excluded women from formal medical education, physicians competed, sometimes aggressively, with their informal practice in the home.