Kristy Bredin, Herbalist

Kristy Bredin is an herbalist and wellness coach practicing in the traditions of her many teachers, including Robin Rose Bennett, Chanchal Cabrera, and Ryan Drum, using the land and sea herbs that grow around us as food and in her medicines. Kristy is passionate about exploring the natural world and working with wild plants in ancient and creative ways. She supports folks in re-engaging and integrating with their natural environment through wild plant medicine work. She specializes in working with seaweeds as foods and medicines, and is currently writing a book on this topic, Marine Herbalism, to be published in 2029.

Kristy found herself studying plants as food and medicine after searching for but not finding true healing through Western medicine. After many years of being stuck in the work to barely live cycle, she left her day job of 7 years and set out on a magnificent journey to find a deeper way of living simply and close to the earth, to connect her voice with her heart, and to reclaim her life. She strives to live authentically and fully and to walk proudly on her unique path. Kristy is available to support others as they grow on their own paths and to help connect them with the medicine and healing they seek.

Interested in working with seaweeds for supporting your unique health situation?

For a limited time, 10% off initial consultation package for folks looking for support in the following areas and who are interested in working with seaweeds as part of an herbal and nutritional protocol:

• thyroid support (particularly hypothyroidism)

• mineral support

• cardiovascular 

• immune system support

• digestion

• cancer

• rheumatism/degenerative joint conditions

• pain, injury, surgery

• metabolism and weight

• viruses and viral related conditions (HPV, HSV)

• lung support

• dental health

• prostate health

Email kristy@mermaid-botanicals.com to inquire.

For additional inquiries, please contact Kristy@mermaid-botanicals.com

From Barbara Erenreich's "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses" https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/ehrenreich-barbara/witches.htm

Women and the Rise of the American Medical Profession 

In the US the male takeover of healing roles started later than in England or France, but ultimately went much further. There is probably no industrialized country with a lower percentage of women doctors than the US today: England has 24 percent; Russia has 75 percent; the US has only seven percent. And while midwifery – female midwifery – is still a thriving occupation in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, etc., it has been virtually outlawed here since the early twentieth century. By the turn of the century, medicine here was closed to all but a tiny minority of necessarily tough and well-heeled women. What was left was nursing, and this was in no way a substitute for the autonomous roles women had enjoyed as midwives and general healers. 

The question is not so much how women got “left out” of medicine and left with nursing, but how did these categories arise at all? To put it another way: How did one particular set of healers, who happened to be male, white and middle class, manage to oust all the competing folk healers, midwives and other practitioners who had dominated the American medical scene in the early 1800s? 

The conventional answer given by medical historians is, of course, that there always was one trueAmerican medical profession – a small band of men whose scientific and moral authority flowed in an unbroken stream from Hippocrates, Galen and the great European medical scholars. In frontier America these doctors had to combat, not only the routine problems of sickness and death, but the abuses of a host of lay practitioners – usually depicted as women, ex-slaves, Indians and drunken patent medicine salesmen. Fortunately for the medical profession, in the late 19th century the American public suddenly developed a healthy respect for the doctors’ scientific knowledge, outgrew its earlier faith in quacks, and granted the true medical profession a lasting monopoly of the healing arts. 

But the real answer is not in this made-up drama of science versus ignorance and superstition. It’s part of the 19th century’s long story of class and sex struggles for power in all areas of life. 

When women had a place in medicine, it was in a people’s medicine. When that people’s medicine was destroyed, there was no place for women – except in the subservient role of nurses. The set of healers who became the medical profession was distinguished not so much by its associations with modern science as by its associations with the emerging American business establishment. With all due respect to Pasteur, Koch and the other great European medical researchers of the 19th century, it was the Carnegies and Rockefellers who intervened to secure the final victory of the American medical profession. 

The US in 1800 could hardly have been a more unpromising environment for the development of a medical profession, or any profession, for that matter. Few formally trained physicians had emigrated here from Europe. There were very few schools of medicine in America and very few institutions of higher learning altogether. The general public, fresh from a war of national liberation, was hostile to professionalism and “foreign” elitisms of any type. 

In Western Europe, university-trained physicians already had a centuries’ old monopoly over the right to heal. But in America, medical practice was traditionally open to anyone who could demonstrate healing skills – regardless of formal training, race or sex. Ann Hutchinson, the dissenting religious leader of the 1600s, was a practitioner of “general physik,” as were many other ministers and their wives. The medical historian Joseph Kett reports that “one of the most respected medical men in late 18th century Windsor, Connecticut, for example, was a freed Negro called “Dr. Primus.” In New Jersey, medical practice, except in extraordinary cases, was mainly in the hands of women as late as 1818...” 

Women frequently went into joint practices with their husbands: The husband handling the surgery, the wife the midwifery and gynecology, and everything else shared. Or a woman might go into practice after developing skills through caring for family members or through an apprenticeship with a relative or other established healer. For example, Harriet Hunt, one of America’s first trained female doctors, became interested in medicine during her sister’s illness, worked for a while with a husband-wife “doctor” team, then simply hung out her own shingle. (Only later did she undertake formal training.) 

Enter the Doctor 

In the early 1800s there was also a growing number of formally trained doctors who took great pains to distinguish themselves from the host of lay practitioners. The most important real distinction was that the formally trained, or “regular” doctors as they called themselves, were male, usually middle class, and almost always more expensive than the lay competition. The “regulars’” practices were largely confined to middle and upper class people who could afford the prestige of being treated by a “gentleman” of their own class. By 1800, fashion even dictated that upper and middle class women employ male “regular” doctors for obstetrical care – a custom which plainer people regarded as grossly indecent. 

In terms of medical skills and theory, the so-called “regulars” had nothing to recommend them over the lay practitioners. Their “formal training” meant little even by European standards of the time: Medical programs varied in length from a few months to two years; many medical schools had no clinical facilities; high school diplomas were not required for admission to medical schools. Not that serious academic training would have helped much anyway – there was no body of medical science to be trained in. Instead, the “regulars” were taught to treat most ills by “heroic” measures: massive bleeding, huge doses of laxatives, calomel (a laxative containing mercury) and, later, opium. (The European medical profession had little better to offer at this time either.) There is no doubt that these “cures” were often either fatal or more injurious than the original disease. In the judgment of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., himself a distinguished physician, if all the medicines used by the “regular” doctors in the US were thrown into the ocean, it would be so much the better for mankind and so much the worse for the fishes. 

The lay practitioners were undoubtedly safer and more effective than the “regulars.” They preferred mild herbal medications, dietary changes and hand-holding to heroic interventions. Maybe they didn’t know any more than the “regulars,” but at least they were less likely to do the patient harm. Left alone, they might well have displaced the “regular” doctors with even middle class consumers in time. But they didn’t know the right people. The “regulars,” with their close ties to the upper class, had legislative clout. By 1830, 13 states had passed medical licensing laws outlawing “irregular” practice and establishing the “regulars” as the only legal healers. 

It was a premature move. There was no popular support for the idea of medical professionalism, much less for the particular set of healers who claimed it. And there was no way to enforce the new laws: The trusted healers of the common people could not be just legislated out of practice. Worse still – for the “regulars” – this early grab for medical monopoly inspired mass indignation in the form of a radical, popular health movement which came close to smashing medical elitism in America once and for all. 

The Popular Health Movement 

The Popular Health Movement of the 1830s and 40s is usually dismissed in conventional medical histories as the high-tide of quackery and medical cultism. In reality it was the medical front of a general social upheaval stirred up by feminist and working class movements. Women were the backbone of the Popular Health Movement. “Ladies Physiological Societies,” the equivalent of our know-your-body courses, sprang up everywhere, bringing rapt audiences simple instruction in anatomy and personal hygiene. The emphasis was on preventive care, as opposed to the murderous “cures” practiced by the “regular” doctors. The Movement ran up the banner for frequent bathing (regarded as a vice by many “regular” doctors of the time), loose-fitting female clothing, whole grain cereals, temperance, and a host of other issues women could relate to. And, at about the time that Margaret Sanger’s mother was a little girl, some elements of the Movement were already pushing birth control. 

The Movement was a radical assault on medical elitism, and an affirmation of the traditional people’s medicine. “Every man his own doctor,” was the slogan of one wing of the Movement, and they made it very clear that they meant every woman too. The “regular,” licensed, doctors were attacked as members of the “parasitic, non-producing classes,” who survived only because of the upper class’ “lurid taste” for calomel and bleeding. Universities (where the elite of the “regular” doctors were trained) were denounced as places where students “learn to look upon labor as servile and demeaning” and to identify with the upper class. Working class radicals rallied to the cause, linking “King-craft, Priest-craft, Lawyer-craft and Doctor-craft” as the four great evils of the time. In New York State, the Movement was represented in the legislature by a member of the Workingman’s Party, who took every opportunity to assail the “privileged doctors.” 

The “regular” doctors quickly found themselves outnumbered and cornered. From the left-wing of the Popular Health Movement came a total rejection of “doctoring” as a paid occupation – much less as an overpaid “profession.” From the moderate wing came a host of new medical philosophies, or sects, to compete with the “regulars” on their own terms: Eclecticism, Grahamism, Homeopathy, plus many minor ones. The new sects set up their own medical schools, (emphasizing preventive care and mild herbal cures), and started graduating their own doctors. In this context of medical ferment, the old “regulars” began to look like just another sect, a sect whose particular philosophy happened to lean towards calomel, bleeding and the other stand-bys of “heroic” medicine. It was impossible to tell who were the “real” doctors, and by the 1840s, medical licensing laws had been repealed in almost all of the states. 

The peak of the Popular Health Movement coincided with the beginnings of an organized feminist movement, and the two were so closely linked that it’s hard to tell where one began and the other left off. “This crusade for women’s health [the Popular Health Movement] was related both in cause and effect to the demand for women’s rights in general, and the health and feminist movements become indistinguishable at this point,” according to Richard Shryock, the well-known medical historian. The health movement was concerned with women’s rights in general, and the women’s movement was particularly concerned with health and with women’s access to medical training. 

In fact, leaders of both groups used the prevailing sex stereotypes to argue that women were even better equipped to be doctors than men. “We cannot deny that women possess superior capacities for the science of medicine,” wrote Samuel Thomson, a Health Movement leader, in 1834. (However, he felt surgery and the care of males should be reserved for male practitioners.) Feminists, like Sarah Hale, went further, exclaiming in 1852: “Talk about this [medicine] being the appropriate sphere for man and his alone! With tenfold more plausibility and reason we say it is the appropriate sphere for woman, and hers alone.” 

The new medical sects’ schools did, in fact, open their doors to women at a time when “regular” medical training was all but closed to them. For example, Harriet Hunt was denied admission to Harvard Medical College, and instead went to a sectarian school for her formal training. (Actually, the Harvard faculty had voted to admit her – along with some black male students – but the students threatened to riot if they came.) The “regular” physicians could take the credit for training Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female “regular,” but her alma mater (a small school in upstate New York) quickly passed a resolution barring further female students. The first generally co-ed medical school was the “irregular” Eclectic Central Medical College of New York, in Syracuse. Finally, the first two all-female medical colleges, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia, were themselves “irregular.” 

Feminist researchers should really find out more about the Popular Health Movement. From the perspective of our movement today, it’s probably more relevant than the women’s suffrage struggle. To us, the most tantalizing aspects of the Movement are: (1) That it represented both class struggle and feminist struggle: Today, it’s stylish in some quarters to write off purely feminist issues as middle class concerns. Put in the Popular Health Movement we see a coming together of feminist and working class energies. Is this because the Popular Health Movement naturally attracted dissidents of all kinds, or was there some deeper identity of purpose? (2)The Popular Health Movement was not just a movement for more and better medical care, but for a radically different kind of health care: It was a substantive challenge to the prevailing medical dogma, practice and theory. Today we tend to confine our critiques to the organization of medical care, and assume that the scientific substratum of medicine is unassailable. We too should be developing the capability for the critical study of medical “science” – at least as it relates to women.

Doctors on the Offensive 

At its height in the 1830s and 1840s, the Popular Health Movement had the “regular” doctors – the professional ancestors of today’s physicians – running scared. Later in the 19th century, as the grassroots energy ebbed and the Movement degenerated into a set of competing sects, the “regulars” went back on the offensive. In 1848, they pulled together their first national organization, pretentiously named the American Medical Association (AMA.) County and state medical societies, many of which had practically disbanded during the height of medical anarchy in the ‘30s and ‘40s, began to reform. 

Throughout the latter part of the 19th century, the “regulars” relentlessly attacked lay practitioners, sectarian doctors and women practitioners in general. The attacks were linked: Women practitioners could be attacked because of their sectarian leanings; sects could be attacked because of their openness to women. The arguments against women doctors ranged from the paternalistic (how could a respectable woman travel at night to a medical emergency?) to the hard core sexist. In his presidential address to the AMA in 1871, Dr. Alfred Stille, said: 

Certain women seek to rival men in manly sports...and the strong-minded ape them in all things, even in dress. In doing so they may command a sort of admiration such as all monstrous productions inspire, especially when they aim towards a higher type than their own. 

The virulence of the American sexist opposition to women in medicine has no parallel in Europe. This is probably because: First, fewer European women were aspiring to medical careers at this time. Second, feminist movements were nowhere as strong as in the US, and here the male doctors rightly associated the entrance of women into medicine with organized feminism. And, third, the European medical profession was already more firmly established and hence less afraid of competition.

The rare woman who did make it into a “regular” medical school faced one sexist hurdle after another. First there was the continuous harassment – often lewd – by the male students. There were professors who wouldn’t discuss anatomy with a lady present. There were textbooks like a well-known 1848 obstetrical text which stated, “She [Woman] has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love.” There were respectable gynecological theories of the injurious effects of intellectual activity on the female reproductive organs. 

Having completed her academic work, the would-be woman doctor usually found the next steps blocked. Hospitals were usually closed to women doctors, and even if they weren’t, the internships were not open to women. If she did finally make it into practice, she found her brother “regulars’’ unwilling to refer patients to her and absolutely opposed to her membership in their medical societies. 

And so it is all the stranger to us, and all the sadder, that what we might call the “women’s health movement” began, in the late 19th century, to dissociate itself from its Popular Health Movement past and to strive for respectability. Members of irregular sects were purged from the faculties of the women’s medical colleges. Female medical leaders such as Elizabeth Blackwell joined male “regulars” in demanding an end to lay midwifery and “a complete medical education” for all who practiced obstetrics. All this at a time when the “regulars” still had little or no “scientific” advantage over the sect doctors or lay healers. 

The explanation, we suppose, was that the women who were likely to seek formal medical training at this time were middle class. They must have found it easier to identify with the middle class “regular” doctors than with lower class women healers or with the sectarian medical groups (which had earlier been identified with radical movements.) The shift in allegiance was probably made all the easier by the fact that, in the cities, female lay practitioners were increasingly likely to be immigrants. (At the same time, the possibilities for a cross-class women’s movement on any issue were vanishing as working class women went into the factories and middle class women settled into Victorian ladyhood.) Whatever the exact explanation, the result was that middle class women had given up the substantive attack on male medicine, and accepted the terms set by the emerging male medical profession. 

Professional Victory 

The “regulars” were still in no condition to make another bid for medical monopoly. For one thing, they still couldn’t claim to have any uniquely effective methods or special body of knowledge. Besides, an occupational group doesn’t gain a professional monopoly on the basis of technical superiority alone. A recognized profession is not just a group of self-proclaimed experts; it is a group which has authority in the law to select its own members and regulate their practice, i.e., to monopolize a certain field without outside interference. How does a particular group gain full professional status? In the words of sociologist Elliot Freidson: 

A profession attains and maintains its position by virtue of the protection and patronage of some elite segment of society which has been persuaded that there is some special value in its work. 

In other words, professions are the creation of a ruling class. To become the medical profession, the “regular” doctors needed, above all, ruling class patronage. 

By a lucky coincidence for the “regulars,” both the science and the patronage became available around the same time, at the turn of the century. French and especially German scientists brought forth the germ theory of disease which provided, for the first time in human history, a rational basis for disease prevention and therapy. While the run-of-the-mill American doctor was still mumbling about “humors” and dosing people with calomel, a tiny medical elite was travelling to German universities to learn the new science. They returned to the US filled with reformist zeal. In 1893 German-trained doctors (funded by local philanthropists) set up the first American German-style medical school, Johns Hopkins. 

As far as curriculum was concerned, the big innovation at Hopkins was integrating lab work in basic science with expanded clinical training. Other reforms included hiring full time faculty, emphasizing research, and closely associating the medical school with a full university. Johns Hopkins also introduced the modern pattern of medical education – four years of medical school following four years of college – which of course barred most working class and poor people from the possibility of a medical education. 

Meanwhile the US was emerging as the industrial leader of the world. Fortunes built on oil, coal and the ruthless exploitation of American workers were maturing into financial empires. For the first time in American history, there were sufficient concentrations of corporate wealth to allow for massive, organized philanthropy, i.e., organized ruling class intervention in the social, cultural and political life of the nation. Foundations were created as the lasting instruments of this intervention – the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations appeared in the first decade of the 20th century. One of the earliest and highest items on their agenda was medical “reform,” the creation of a respectable, scientific American medical profession. 

The group of American medical practitioners that the foundations chose to put their money behind was, naturally enough, the scientific elite of the “regular” doctors. (Many of these men were themselves ruling class, and all were urbane, university-trained gentlemen.) Starting in 1903, foundation money began to pour into medical schools by the millions. The conditions were clear: Conform to the Johns Hopkins model or close. To get the message across, the Carnegie Corporation sent a staff man, Abraham Flexner, out on a national tour of medical schools – from Harvard right down to the last third-rate commercial schools. 

Flexner almost single-handedly decided which schools would get the money – and hence survive. For the bigger and better schools (i.e. those which already had enough money to begin to institute the prescribed reforms), there was the promise of fat foundation grants. Harvard was one of the lucky winners, and its president could say smugly in 1907, “Gentlemen, the way to get endowments for medicine is to improve medical education.” As for the smaller, poorer schools, which included most of the sectarian schools and special schools for blacks and women – Flexner did not consider them worth saving. Their options were to close, or to remain open and face public denunciation in the report Flexner was preparing. 

The Flexner Report, published in 1910, was the foundations’ ultimatum to American medicine. In its wake, medical schools closed by the score, including six of America’s eight black medical schools and the majority of the “irregular” schools which had been a haven for female students. Medicine was established once and for all as a branch of “higher” learning, accessible only through lengthy and expensive university training. It’s certainly true that as medical knowledge grew, lengthier training did become necessary. But Flexner and the foundations had no intention of making such training available to the great mass of lay healers and “irregular” doctors. Instead, doors were slammed shut to blacks, to the majority of women and to poor white men. (Flexner in his report bewailed the fact that any “crude boy or jaded clerk” had been able to seek medical training.) Medicine had become a white, male, middle class occupation 

But it was more than an occupation. It had become, at last, a profession. To be more precise, one particular group of healers, the “regular” doctors, was now the medical profession. Their victory was not based on any skills of their own: The run-of-the-mill “regular” doctor did not suddenly acquire a knowledge of medical science with the publication of the Flexner report. But he did acquire the mystique of science. So what if his own alma mater had been condemned in the Flexner report; wasn’t he a member of the AMA, and wasn’t it in the forefront of scientific reform? The doctor had become – thanks to some foreign scientists and eastern foundations – the “man of science”: beyond criticism, beyond regulation, very nearly beyond competition. 

Outlawing the Midwives 

In state after state, new, tough, licensing laws sealed the doctor’s monopoly on medical practice. All that was left was to drive out the last holdouts of the old people’s medicine – the midwives. In 1910, about 50 percent of all babies were delivered by midwives – most were blacks or working class immigrants. It was an intolerable situation to the newly emerging obstetrical specialty: For one thing, every poor woman who went to a midwife was one more case lost to academic teaching and research. America’s vast lower class resources of obstetrical “teaching material” were being wasted on ignorant midwives. Besides which, poor women were spending an estimated $5 million a year on midwives – $5 million which could have been going to “professionals.” 

Publicly, however, the obstetricians launched their attacks on midwives in the name of science and reform. Midwives were ridiculed as “hopelessly dirty, ignorant and incompetent.” Specifically, they were held responsible for the prevalence of puerperal sepsis (uterine infections) and neonatal ophthalmia (blindness due to parental infection with gonorrhea). Both conditions were easily preventable by techniques well within the grasp of the least literate midwife (hand-washing for puerperal sepsis, and eye drops for the ophthalmia.) So the obvious solution for a truly public-spirited obstetrical profession would have been to make the appropriate preventive techniques known and available to the mass of midwives. This is in fact what happened in England, Germany and most other European nations: Midwifery was upgraded through training to become an established, independent occupation. 

But the American obstetricians had no real commitment to improved obstetrical care. In fact, a study by Johns Hopkins professor in 1912 indicated that most American doctors were less competent than the midwives. Not only were the doctors themselves unreliable about preventing sepsis and ophthalmia but they also tended to be too ready to use surgical techniques which endangered mother or child. If anyone, then, deserved a legal monopoly on obstetrical care, it was the midwives, not the MDs. But the doctors had power, the midwives didn’t. Under intense pressure from the medical profession, state after state passed laws outlawing midwifery and restricting the practice of obstetrics to doctors. For poor and working class women, this actually meant worse – or no – obstetrical care. (For instance, a study of infant mortality rates in Washington showed an increase in infant mortality in the years immediately following the passage of the law forbidding midwifery.) For the new, male medical profession, the ban on midwives meant one less source of competition. Women had been routed from their last foothold as independent practitioners.