Matrescence in the West: a history
I wrote the essay A little extra something when I lived in Bullaburra, in the Blue Mountains. My children were very young. It took me a good six months and I thought about it day and night. In every spare moment, when my children were asleep or in someone else’s care, I sat in my cramped study overlooking the wild green Bullaburra gully with its raucous flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos, dreaming and writing, writing and dreaming, urgently. ...Then when I finished in August 1994, I didn’t publish it. I had no idea who might be interested. I’ll never forget that Maureen Minchin kindly read every word and phoned me to say she really liked it. After we hung up, I shouted out with happiness into the bright gully air.
You made him ruler over the works of your hands
You made (man) ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea. Psalm 8:6
To understand Wyeth, it helps to remember that the industrial worldview which has risen to planetary dominance over the past few hundred years is defined by the belief that natural processes should be manipulated to serve human beings - and to serve the accumulation of wealth.
This belief is at the heart of the startling changes in the social fabric of recent centuries, and also underlies the complex demise of the human female's ability to easefully feed her young, directly from her own breasts which occurred throughout the 20th century. At the turn of the 20th century in the United States and Europe still more than half of children one year old or more were breastfed. By 1970 only one-quarter of babies leaving hospital after birth in America received any breastmilk at all. Thirty years ago, when I first wrote this essay, authorities feared that breastfeeding rates were still in global decline.
Now, in the last decade, global breastfeeding rates have been improving. But still in Australia, although 96% of women want to breastfeed, only 39% are able to exclusively breastfeed at the end of the first three months of their baby's life.
While neither doctors nor formula companies can be isolated from the intricate web of factors for blame, bottle-feeding with substitutes could not have permeated contemporary culture as profoundly as it has without the active undermining of the success of lactation by the medical profession, and our participation in the propaganda of the breastmilk substitute industry.
The rise of the doctors
To understand how this has been possible even though we doctors view ourselves as the defenders of health, we need to re-examine conventional interpretations of the history of our profession.
When I studied medicine, retired professors taught medical students of noble (male) minds sweeping back through history to Hippocrates and Galen. These men, we are told, wrested knowledge out of ignorance. They were beacons of light piercing the darkness.
This was, however, as much an illusory view of our past as was the kind of Australian history I was taught in class as a child, which was an androcentric, ethnocentric distortion, bogged down in white sails, English flags, highminded governors, and dispensable indigenous people. I knew nothing until much later of the unspeakable violence, the rivers of blood, the ongoing gaslighting of entire peoples, which made it possible for my forebears and then myself to live materially comfortable lives on this Australian continent.
In fact we doctors arose as a healing profession out of the ashes of the witch-hunts. The mechanistic worldview surged to bloody ascendance in Europe through the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, laying the groundwork for our scientific age, although at the time very short on science.
The new breed of white and wealthy male "doctor" was renown for heroic (and dangerous) practice, extortionate fees, and a determination to keep women out of the medical schools. In these elitist halls, men alone prepared for the job, through the study of theology, Plato and Aristotle. When sick or birthing, most ordinary people still turned to the local folk-healers, as they had done for millennia. But these were the kind of women who were also persecuted as “witches”: often illiterate and independently minded peasant women.
How wise women were turned into witches
In 1486, the Dominican priests Kramer and Sprenger published the Malleus Maleficarum, "The Hammer of the Witches". This sadistic treatise was embraced by both the church and the state throughout Europe over the next two and a half centuries. It nailed perversity into the name and vocation of the “wise women”. It tore the flesh and spilt the blood of the indigenous healers of our Western culture.
Since then, disfigurement and denigration of the older woman labelled as a witch have been mythologised in European fairy tales, so that word "witch", meaning "wise woman", might still trigger in us a deep-seated fear and revulsion absorbed from the bed-time stories of early childhood.
But the wise woman shines through objective examination of medieval records as the empiricist of her times. Her healing and midwifery skill were safer and more successful than the leachings, purgings, doses of mercury and superstitious theology of the first doctors.
She had the original and extensive understanding of the bones and muscles of the human body. She was the original practitioner of inoculation for disease including smallpox. She worked with an ancient pharmacopoeia of medicinal herbs, from which certain contemporary drugs still derive. Francis Bacon is just one of a number of famous men of the Scientific Revolution who attributed their information to wise women, or witches. Paracelsus, hailed as "the father of modern chemistry", burnt his texts in 1527 declaring a sorceress taught him all he knew.
The folk healer was the memory bank for millennia of trials of diverse remedies. Her oral lore was an ancient matrilineal repository of healing knowledge. Australians from families who arrived in the past century or two, like myself, are only beginning to grasp the extraordinary complexity of our own First Peoples’ stories about the land, waters and skies, and the breathtaking sophistication of their botanical, agricultural, astronomical, and other bodies of knowledge.
It's not surprising, then, that we've been slow to understand how traditional repositories of folk knowledge in Western culture have also been lost, burnt at the stake, and how this secured the status of the nascent medical profession, with its crude and untried tools?
What was at stake, literally, was worldview: the philosophical underpinnings of a culture. The traditional wise women of Western cultures trusted the dynamic, sensitive intelligence of flesh. Like the other indigenous healers of other cultures, they understood the value of patience. They had a feel for the context of illness and directed their attention to the support of organic processes, to the study of those things that interfered with the delicately balanced ecosystems of the natural.
Whilst the science of medicine had not yet begun, and in truth did not begin to impact positively on the health of human beings and on the health and wellbeing of birthing women and their babies until the first decades of the twentieth century, the mind-set of the medical men triumphed through violent repression of folk-healers in the West.
The status of the doctor was secured by public mutilation and murder with rope and flame of thousands of peasant women, by the mutilation and sexual torture of thousands more, by the ensuing terror that forced traditional women's ways of knowing underground, and by the doctor's role as witness against the witches at the trials. The patriarchs of the West crushed a politically threatening indigenous spirituality and healing practice. The new medical profession sprang naive as a kitten out of killing fields soaked with female blood.
As the traditional midwife disappeared, so did the skilled support that she gave the lactating mother, at a time when the iatrogenic failure of lactation began to rapidly spread.