Rediscovering the Legacy Of Women's Health

In this important 3-part audio series, Gary Null investigates the full history of the Women's Health Movement from its origins in primitive societies over 30,000 years ago through the development of modern medicine in the past two centuries. This history of medicine has not always been kind to women.

While women healers, herbalists, and midwives originally played a pivotal role in the delivery of basic but effective local health care, this ended with the rise of the male-dominated medieval Church, which barred women from the practice of medicine, and punished those who did as "witches" to be impaled or burned at the stake. This was not a trivial matter, as scholars now estimate that "millions" of women were hunted and executed as witches during the Inquisition and its aftermath.

Until the 20th Century, universities such as Harvard routinely denied women medical educations, the new and exclusive franchise for practicing medicine. Only until recently, routine hysterectomies, pelvic manipulations (masturbation), and opium treatments were considered normal and acceptable medical treatments for women. Even today, surgeons perform unnecessary episiotomies and radical mastectomies, all in the name of "medical science." Meanwhile, a confluence of social, cultural, and religious forces have all sought to suppress the rights and powers of women, and their important influence in the healing arts. And more recently, large profit motives have invidiously come to dominate modern health care, undermining its true purpose of healing people of their diseases, and improving the public health.

Until we reclaim the legacy of women's health, we have all lost as a result. In this unique examination, Gary Null pulls together much of the important scholarly research on the history of women's health, and relates it to listeners in a compelling, understandable, and universal manner.

Special thanks to the following people for their invaluable assistance in assembling the material contained in this series: Barbara Seaman, Helen I. Marieskind, Suzanne Clores, Audrey Flack, Judith Kletter, Sherrill Sellman, Stephanie Golden, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dierdre English, Louise Bernikow, Jim Feast and Tania Ketenjian.