The Witch Trials in Salem
While witches practiced among the peole, the ruling classes were cultivating their own breed
of secular healers: the university-trained physicians. In the century that preceded the beginning of the
,,witch-craze" 13th century European medicine became firmly established as a secular science and
a profession. The medical profession was actively engaged in the elimination of female healers their
exclusion from the universitiess, for example long before the witch-hunts began.
There was nothing in late medieval medical training that conflicted with church doctrine.
Medical students spent years studying Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology and a doctor rarely saw
any patients at all, and no experimentation of any kind was taught. Medicine was sharply
differentiated from surgery, which was almost everywhere considered a degrading, menial craft, and
the dissection of bodies was almost unheard of
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