For centuries, women turned to wise women and midwives for healing, birth support, and intimate knowledge of their own bodies—knowledge that formal medicine lacked or denied them access to. These healers held deep understanding of botanical medicine, guiding women through the passages of life: easing labor, preventing pregnancy, navigating reproductive choice. Their wisdom was vast, embodied, passed woman to woman.

As medicine became institutionalized and male-dominated, these women and their knowledge were reframed as dangerous. What had been healing became heresy. What had been wisdom became witchcraft. Their understanding of women's bodies—especially reproductive autonomy—threatened the emerging order.

The Salem witch trials, for example, reveal this pattern clearly. Many accused women were postmenopausal, outside the bounds of conventional feminine roles. The charges targeted their healing knowledge and the power attributed to them—the ability to help or harm through means the accusers could not control or understand.

What was lost in those fires? How much wisdom about women's bodies was silenced, forgotten, burned away? And how does that loss still echo in the gaps of modern women's health research today?