10/27/2025
With Halloween approaching, I was contemplating the historical association between midwives and witches. While doing a little research, I came across this 2019 blog post by Lilian Climo for the International Museum of Surgical Science, titled “A Note from the Collections: Midwives and Healers in the European Witch Trials”.
I found the following excerpt to be interesting:
“Among the many surprising and seemingly unreasonable reasons women could be tried and killed as witches, was their role as a midwife or healer.
This fact may be shocking, as today we perceive midwiving to be a positive career. What could be so wicked about helping safely deliver babies, or using herbal remedies to alleviate the pain of childbirth? However, it was likely the employment of plant medicines that posed the biggest issue for the Catholic Church during this time. For instance in Western Europe, midwives often used belladonna, deadly nightshade, and ergot ,a fungus which grows on rye, during the labor process (Lang). These remedies seemed to be generally effective in easing some of the suffering of childbirth, yet, the church likely perceived any attempt to assuage this pain as a violation of God’s wishes (Ehrenreich and English).
Major European churches enforced the belief that pain during childbirth was punishment for Eve’s Original Sin (Ehrenreich and English). Therefore, ameliorating the pain of delivery could have been equated with witchcraft. “
A Note from the Collections: Midwives and Healers in the European Witch Trials. Ramirez, Eduardo, Colombian Surgery: Ovariectomy, 1954. IMSS
