Folk and domestic herbalism

The largest herbal tradition by volume was practised almost entirely by women, almost entirely unpaid, and almost entirely unwritten — which is why we know least about it.

What it is

The everyday medicine of households and villages — what was actually used, by most people, for most complaints, for most of history, outside any professional or literate system.

It has no founder, no canon and no theory worth the name. It is a body of transmitted practical knowledge: which plant for a burn, which for a cough, where it grows, when to pick it, how to keep it through winter.

It was overwhelmingly the work of women, and it was unpaid. The person who treated a household was generally the woman running it, and the person a village called on for a difficult birth or a persistent fever was generally an older woman with a reputation. Neither was a profession, and neither wrote anything down.

Where it came from

Everywhere, continuously, and mostly invisibly. What survives comes from four kinds of source, and each distorts in its own way.

Receipt books. Household manuscript collections of recipes for food and medicine together, copied and annotated across generations, mostly by literate women. Large numbers survive in archives and they are the best direct evidence there is — while representing only households wealthy and literate enough to keep them.

The printed herbals, which mined folk practice while looking down on it. Culpeper is the honourable exception, having deliberately published in English for people who could not pay a physician.

Nineteenth and twentieth century folklorists, who collected it as it was disappearing — and who recorded what interested them, which was the picturesque and the magical rather than the routine.

Court records, which is a genuinely grim source: what we know of some practitioners' methods comes from the evidence against them at trial.

How it is practised

Simples rather than compounds — one plant, straightforwardly prepared — because a household has one plant, not a dispensary. Infusions, poultices, salves in animal fat, syrups, vinegars. Local plants, gathered locally, in season.

The knowledge is embedded in ordinary life rather than in consultations, and it travels between women in kitchens. Nothing here is instruction.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the witch-trial connection is real and is routinely overstated. The widely repeated claim that the trials were an organised suppression of women's herbal medicine — that midwives and healers were targeted as a class to clear the way for male physicians — is a 1970s thesis, popularised by Ehrenreich and English's Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1973), and it has not held up. The historical work, set out under the witch trials, finds that midwives were not disproportionately accused and were as often witnesses for the prosecution as defendants.

What is true is narrower and still substantial: healing reputation cut both ways. Someone credited with curing could be blamed when a cure failed, and accusations sometimes followed. That is a real danger attached to the role. It is not a campaign against it.

We can say the professionalisation exclusion is much better documented. The 1518 charter of the College of Physicians, the 1511 English act requiring licensing, and the long nineteenth-century construction of medical registration progressively made it illegal to practise for payment without credentials that women were barred from obtaining. Elizabeth Blackwell qualified in 1849; British medical schools admitted women from the 1870s. That is the mechanism by which women were removed from medicine, and it needed no witch trials at all — just examinations they were not allowed to sit.

We can say some of it worked and we mostly cannot tell which. Willow bark, foxglove, garlic, honey on wounds and moulds on infections all have real bases, and Withering got digoxin out of a Shropshire woman's recipe. Alongside that sat a great deal that did nothing and some that was actively harmful. Nobody was recording outcomes, so the tradition had no mechanism to distinguish its successes from its failures, and neither do we.

We can say the transmission has largely ended. The knowledge was oral, held by people who did not write, and passed in a domestic setting that no longer exists in most of the world. What is sold today as folk or "wise woman" herbalism is generally a twentieth-century reconstruction from printed sources — often a good-faith one, sometimes an excellent one, and not a continuous line. Susun Weed's "wise woman tradition" is a coined framework from the 1980s, not an inherited one.

And we can say the romanticisation costs something. The village healer of popular imagination — wise, effective, persecuted — is doing emotional work rather than historical. The actual picture is of people with limited options doing their best with what grew nearby, achieving something and losing a great many patients, in a world with appalling maternal and infant mortality. Treating that as a lost golden age is not respect for it.

We cannot recover most of what was known. What can be said is that this was the largest herbal tradition there has ever been, that it was carried almost entirely by women whose names are gone, and that the reason it left so little record is the same reason it was displaced.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading