We may think regretfully of what Western medicine could have been today had that power grab—from the female healers, from women in general, and in opposition to all the values associated with them—not happened. Driven out of the medical profession, as we have seen, women were first allowed to return as nurses. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English observe, the nurse is an idealized woman—gentle, maternal, devoted—just as the doctor is an idealized man, haloed with the prestige of science; romance novelists are never wrong about these things. In his skilled hands lie the diagnostic
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