Who Gets to Be Called a Healer—and Who Gets Called a Witch?

The Stories We Tell About Witches

October is "Spooky Season" and the stories we tell about witches show up in movies, ads, stores and costumes.

This summer, my daughter and I visited Salem, Massachusetts. At her request, we explored historical sites, listened to stories—both true and fabricated—and took a fairly gimlet-eyed look at the commercialization of a town that has become synonymous with Halloween. 

I saw plenty of witch hats and crystals. She saw a fascinating extension of horror culture. I also saw something else: a history with some surprisingly contemporary echoes. 

As a naturopathic physician specializing in women’s health, with a particular emphasis on botanical medicine and the body's innate capacity for healing, I've experienced—and witnessed—some very old assumptions about holistic medicine and the people who practice it. 

When Forms of Healing Fall Outside Established Authority

The cultural suspicion directed at healing knowledge that falls outside institutional authority has a much longer history than we may realize. I’d like to think that we have outgrown the idea that unfamiliar approaches to healing belong in the realm of "witchcraft." History suggests that medicine, authority, gender, and fear have long shaped who gets recognized as a healer.

Like misogyny, suspicion of women’s authority can run deep. I do my best to collaborate with conventional providers, share the research supporting natural compounds, and advocate for a patient's holistic well-being by building a bridge between conventional and natural medicine. Yet, some may still discount the medicine I practice. 

The Myth of the Midwife-Witch

For much of history, women played a central role in household healing and childbirth care. In medieval and early modern Europe, most illness was treated at home by mothers, wives, and neighbors who kept handwritten "receipt" books of remedies, grew medicinal herbs, set simple injuries, and nursed the sick and dying. Midwives attended many births, and village "wise women" and "cunning folk" of both sexes offered charms, salves, and advice that blended herbal practice with prayer and folk belief. A few women achieved wider renown, like Hildegard of Bingen, whose writings on plants and the body circulated widely in the twelfth century. The line between medicine, magic, and religion was often fluid; illness was sometimes understood in relation to divine will or spiritual forces. 

Policing came in layers. University-trained physicians (initially exclusively male) organized into professional bodies, and the Royal College of Physicians in London was established in 1518. Local authorities began licensing midwives, but licensing was variable by country, region and religious practice. Some were required to swear oaths that they would use no sorcery, would baptize a dying newborn, and would report illegitimate births, which made them both trusted and surveilled. Women who practiced outside emerging professional structures could find their knowledge and authority increasingly questioned, despite their practical experience.

The European witch hunts, during which an estimated 40,000—60,000 people were executed between roughly 1450 and 1750, drew on this atmosphere. Although midwives were not routinely prosecuted as a class, witch-hunting literature like the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) portrayed them as potential threats. About three-quarters of those executed in European witch hunts were women. Historians now caution against the older claim, popularized in the 1970s, that the hunts were a deliberate campaign to eliminate female healers. Most accused women were not healers, and midwives were sometimes the very experts called to examine suspects. 

But healing power was ambivalent: a woman who could cure could be imagined to harm, and a healer whose patient died—or who was outspoken and quarrelsome—could become an easy target for blame. Women’s exclusion from emerging medical institutions was a broader, longer-term development than the persecution of healers alone. 

From Colonial Accusations to Salem

In colonial America these patterns continued in a smaller, more volatile setting. Women continued to be primary home healers and community midwives, and their skills were valued yet could turn dangerous when relationships soured. Anyone who understood the body differently, or who was blamed for an illness or a death, was vulnerable.

Margaret Jones, a midwife and healer in Charlestown, was hanged for witchcraft in Boston in 1648, 44 years before the Salem trials. Her remedies were said to have unnatural effects and patients who rejected her care were said to have worsened. Anne Hutchinson, a midwife whose religious meetings drew large followings, was banished in 1638 for challenging clerical authority. Her opponents later used two separate events—Mary Dyer’s stillbirth, which Hutchinson attended, and Hutchinson’s own pregnancy loss—as supposed signs of divine judgment. 

Enslaved and Indigenous communities maintained distinct and sophisticated traditions of plant-based healing, but colonial authorities often viewed those practices with suspicion and sought to restrict them. A separate example of colonial authorities restricting who could practice medicine came in Virginia in 1748, when lawmakers made it a capital offense for an enslaved person to administer medicine, subject to limited exceptions. 

As medical schools opened in the late eighteenth century, with women excluded, licensing and professional standards increasingly defined "legitimate" medicine as male, setting the stage for the nineteenth-century struggles over women’s authority in medicine.

Slow to Exonerate

During the Salem trials of 1692, nineteen people were hanged, most of them women, and one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea. At least five more died in jail, and roughly two hundred people were accused. As criticism of the proceedings grew, ministers including Increase Mather questioned the reliability of "spectral evidence"—testimony that a person's spirit had appeared in a vision. Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer on October 29, 1692, and later proceedings brought acquittals.

Judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologized in 1697, and Massachusetts eventually issued restitution to families. Formal exoneration came slowly. In 2022, Massachusetts lawmakers formally cleared Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last person in the Salem trials whose conviction had remained uncleared. The site of the hangings, Proctor's Ledge, was confirmed in 2016 and is now a memorial, and a stone memorial to the victims stands beside Salem's Old Burying Point. 

Witch hunts were not simply a coordinated effort to eliminate women healers. They nevertheless offer a lasting warning about what happens when fear, institutional authority, and scapegoating converge against people who are isolated, defiant, or inconvenient.

What History Asks of Us Today

The history of witch persecution is not simply a story of women healers being targeted, and it would be misleading to equate historical witchcraft accusations with modern debates about naturopathic medicine.

In my own practice, I do my best to educate patients and conventional providers about naturopathic medicine, and invite conversation and collaboration. 

The lesson I take from this history is not that every unfamiliar healing practice should be accepted without question. It is that scientific scrutiny and reflexive dismissal are not the same thing. Good medicine requires evidence, curiosity, and a willingness to engage respectfully with people whose experiences or approaches differ from our own. 

Happy Halloween.