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- [00:00]
A
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B
Peter I've often wondered why everybody knows about the Salem witch trials in America, but people talk less about witch hunting in Europe, in spite of the fact that it is on a monumentally bigger scale. Do you think that people really understand the scale and gravity of what happened here?
- [00:52]
C
No, absolutely not. You're right that the Salem witch trials and the witch hunts that go in the colonies in the United States become incredibly famous. And that's partly a product of historiography, of people thinking about the early history of the US after the Europeans arrive. But I mean, the stuff that goes on in Europe is absolutely epic. And actually some of it, I think is. I mean, we're going to talk about it is a bit connected to climate and what's happening in the late 1500s and 1600s. But I would like you afraid, to start by telling us a story that sets it a context. It gives an idea about how widespread and how vicious persecution of women are going to say rather than witches is in Europe in the kind of late.
- [01:35]
B
1500S, it would seem weird to say. Nothing would delight me more because there's nothing delightful about this story, but I oblige. Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm AFWA Hirsch.
- [01:54]
C
I'm Peter Frankerpan.
- [01:56]
B
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations they truly deserve.
- [02:13]
C
This is Women and Healing, part two, the original witch hunt.
- [02:23]
B
So I do want to start with a story, Peter, and it's about King James VI of Scotland, who would later become James the First of England. In 1589, he gets married. So far, so good. His bride to be is Anne of Denmark, the sister of the King Christian IV of Denmark. And like many royals in those days, they marry without actually being physically present in the same place. They get married by proxy, and then the plan is that Anne will sail from Denmark to Scotland, where they will actually be united in person. But when Anne sets sail from Denmark for Scotland, everything goes wrong. It's just one of those disaster trips. First, there are some fatal cannon misfires. Then ships in her convoy collide. Then her own ship Springs, a leak plus, and probably the least surprising part of the story, since it is autumn in the North Sea, there are some really, really bad weather, serious storms that blow the entire fleet off course to Norway. So then the royal party from Denmark has to seek refuge in Norway instead. So James decides, and I want to kind of retrospectively make this seem romantic, although I don't think he's a particularly romantic character.
- [03:37]
C
Come on, Afra, let's hear about it.
- [03:38]
B
I'm trying. I'm trying really hard. James sails to Norway to meet his wife. It's almost like surprising her on this hellish journey she's having. And they officially get married in Oslo in November 1589. But James was never meant to be in Norway, right, and was meant to come directly to Scotland from Denmark. But while he's in Norway, he starts hearing stories that are very popular in in Norway and across the Nordic world at the time. And the most popular story is about what's called the Trier witch trials, which were then ongoing in Germany. These witch trials were insane. By 1587, 368 people, mainly women, had been executed in the German diocese of Trier. It was possibly the largest mass execution in. In Europe in peacetime. They were burned for sorcery in 22 villages. And by 1588, the killing was so extreme that in two villages in this region in Germany, only one female inhabitant was left alive. So this is a horror story. And, you know, we all love Nordic noir. On a cold winter's night these days, we curl up and watch for Bridelson or, you know, something like that. But in those days, it was the trio witch trials that everyone was talking about to keep themselves going through the winter. And it totally caught James's imagination. By the time the royal couple get back to Scotland with more terrible storms along the way, James starts thinking that this witch thing could apply a little bit closer to home. And they start to wonder whether the reason they've had this terrible voyage and all these unfortunate mishaps happen is not because of dysfunctionality in the Admiral or because of classic bad weather in the North Sea, but instead, James starts to think that maybe this is a conspiracy of witches that has doomed his wedding trip. And he becomes obsessed with paranoia. He thinks that there's this violent plot to kill him, that this unchristian sect is planning treason, that these witches are becoming more and more powerful and they have these nefarious intentions. They're going to mess with his life. So he does what any rational person would do. He sets up his own witch trial. Tribunal.
- [05:59]
C
I mean, it all sounds very familiar to the kind of the world of online conspiracy theories where somebody gets some bonkers idea that you think would be lunacy and then other people gather around and reinforce it. So some of it, I guess, is to do with being convinced that you have insights. Right, so he's not the first person to do that. But. But the idea that the, the sovereign of the King of Scotland, who's going, like you said, is going to become the King of England, thinks that there's a way through, that he could be the administer of justice by rounding people up and accusing them for things that you can't really prove. It's going to be tricky. So amazingly, Scottish women start confessing, because that's not surprisingly what you do when you start to get tortured. But God, keep going afar because it's such an incredible story. And like you said, I don't think it's one that's very well known here in the uk.
- [06:50]
B
Well, every time I get the train to Edinburgh, I go through Berwick. You know, it's just beautiful seaside town on the border between Scotland and England. And I didn't know that this was the scene of an incredibly violent persecution of women. So by the end of that year, James has set up the barrack witch trials in which more than 100 suspected witches in North Berwick are arrested and they are tortured, as you said. And we've got examples of the kind of methods that were used from a woman called Agnes Sampson, who was a respected elderly woman from Humby. And she initially refused to confess, but when she was tortured, she, surprise, surprise, decided that indeed she was a witch. And part of this conspiracy, and this is what they did to her, they shaved her head and her body hair, which is incredibly shameful in that era. She was fastened to the wall of her cell by a bridle, an iron instrument with four sharp prongs forced into the mouth so that two prongs press against the tongue and the other two against the cheek. Just incredibly painful and gruesome. She was then kept without sleep, thrown with a rope around her head, and this ordeal was repeated over and over again until eventually she confessed to 53 indictments against her, leading to her being strangled and burned as a witch. And the conspiracy that she confessed to under this duress was that she had attended a Sabbat with 200 witches. And this is exactly what her persecutors wanted to hear. They wanted scale, they wanted conspiracy, they wanted organizing, they wanted evidence that hundreds of local women were involved in these nefarious acts.
- [08:31]
C
I mean, it's amazing. And then King James decides that the best thing to do is to write this all down. So he writes a book called demonology in 1597 that is the product of all of his research, which he sets out in the way that someone who wants to show how clever they are might be expected to do it. So rather than just set it out bluntly, he does it in the form of a Socratic dialogue between the skeptic philomathes and the witch of Us epistemon to, you know, the idea of framing this within a kind of ancient Greek context to show it must have legitimacy and pedigree, but that supposedly reveals many of the aspects of witchcraft. And this book has three sections on magic, on sorcery and witchcraft, and on spirits and ghosts. And it ends with a very lurid account of the North Berwick witch trials based on the evidence of a man called Dr. John Fean, who was also arrested alongside Agnes Sampson, the alleged head of the coven, whose confession was obtained with use of thumb screws, the boot, and by the ripping out of his fingernails. So that's bound to be pretty reliable.
- [09:37]
B
And, you know, when we're thinking about this in the wider context of women in healing, Peter, the thing that really stands out to me is the extent to which it's a setup. So, as we've seen for millennia, women are involved in healing. They have this preoccupation because of their reproductive needs, because of their connection to nature and plants, their role in caring for children and the elderly in communities. They have this expertise. And what King James does is set up this idea, and this is the quote, who knows how to heal, knows how to destroy. So you're basically saying anyone with healing power has destructive power. And it's almost culpability is connected to the fact that you have this gift or this ability or this knowledge. And it means that basically all women are vulnerable to these accusations because women know how to heal. And it just strikes me as so unbelievably barbaric because you are penalizing the people who have the most to offer in making people better. And instead, you're turning it into this source of violence. You're weaponizing healing, which is just a really hard thing to rationalize to me.
- [10:46]
C
So one of the questions is, why does this happen now? What is it about the late 1500s? And the printing press that we've talked about before is obviously part of that democratization. The fact that information can be spread in the kind of post Lutheran age is one of the reasons why the Reformation catches fire. But it's also. There is a climate context to all of this. So the decade between 1590 and 1600 is one of the coldest for two millennia. That's probably to do with massive volcanic eruptions in different parts of the world. And so there are lots of different bits and pieces that kind of come together around about that time. There's a sort of a blue haze. It's called a fashionable malady in Elizabethan England, which is probably to do with high levels of clinical depression, which is often quite correlated with gray skies, you know, cold weather and so on and so forth. The winter blues well suited towards people feeling down and feeling blue. But it just so happens that this is a moment where you have very high levels of persecution of women. And probably that's connected to the other thing that bad climate does, which is lower levels of harvest. So people are concerned about costs, they're worried about food supply. So I guess you have one element which is that who's to blame for these bad weather conditions? So it must be witches, must be people who are deliberately able to convene with the skies to generate torrential rains and bad weather. But also, at times of shortages, there's very high levels of persecutions of any form of minority. So, again, there was some work on the ways in which poor climate outcomes lead to persecution of Jews that you can measure in Europe from 1100 to 1800. But in this particular window, there's just a lot of people being told or being blamed, being tortured, punished, persecuted because of a whole range of other factors. And then when you start to put together what the story you've just told us about North Berwick, about James VI of Scotland, James I of England, but then even into things like Shakespeare, into Macbeth, why there's so much to do with storm clouds, why there's so much to do with witches? You know, tell us about Macbeth and how that fits into this sort of age of dislocation.
- [12:54]
B
So just to set the scene of the scale of this, you know, we talked about North Berwick and, you know, hundreds of women. But across Europe, it's an orgy of misogynistic violence. Hundreds of thousands of people, some historians actually estimate millions are tortured and burned alive in this era, accused of being witches. And women are around 85% of those executed. It includes old women, young women and children. It's a big cultural movement in Europe at this time. So, of course, we see it pop up in literature, and we're more prominent than in Shakespeare. And actually, if you ask any schoolchild in Britain about witches. They will reference Macbeth. My daughter's doing it for GCSE at the moment. You know, one of the most famous accounts of witches in history. And actually Shakespeare is. And remember, Macbeth being a Scottish character, Shakespeare is believed to have been directly influenced by. By King James's Berric Charles. They were so famous at the time, they really captured the public imagination. So when Shakespeare uses these verses about witches, that would have really resonated with his audience and it would have been terrifying to them. People really believe at this time that there are these dark forces possessing female members of their community who have these incredible powers. And so if you're watching Macbeth and you hear the lines feel finger of birth, strangled, babe, ditch, delivered by a drab, you are really scared that there are witches in your midst who could be stealing your newborn babies and delivering them to Satan. It's an incredibly potent environment and all combining with this kind of monarchical obsession, this cultural diffusion, as you said, Peter, the climactic and food pressures. I mean, when we did the potatoes, you know, we were talking about how revolutionary the potato was in Europe because until that point, there was such food insecurity and it was so difficult to create a crop that could provide enough calories for the growing population. So it's a really volatile mix. And women are, in the most violent way imaginable, bearing the brunt. And when we come back after the break, we'll hear more about how women continued amidst all this adversity to keep their healing knowledge of alive and what that meant for others.
- [15:18]
D
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- [15:46]
E
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- [16:11]
C
Sometimes AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything. There's another element, AFWA about witchcraft, persecution, women, which is a slightly odd one. I mean, we mentioned climate, we mentioned odd conditions. We mentioned shortages, but there's another very strong link between accusations, persecutions of women and the role of being a midwife. Just talk us through how that all puts together.
- [16:48]
B
Well, in the first episode, we were talking about how women and their connection to reproduction, childbirth are more in need of healing and medical techniques and knowledge. And of course, there's no better example of that than midwifery. And, you know, midwifery, which is necessary for women to be able to give birth in this era, starts to be weaponized as evidence that women are up to all these supernatural evil practices. So midwifery has a long history, well before the medieval witch hunts. In fact, it predates obstetrics by thousands of years, Peter and it gave rise to the discipline, a name, obsteryx, being Latin for midwife. And in practice, the two were inextricably linked and interchangeable. In fact, until the 20th century, when childbirth became medicalized to a new extent, there was a much more fluid boundary between the role of midwife and doctor. And the power that midwives have in this pre medicalised era makes this one of the fields in which women's power and agency are most visible. So of course, now, in the context of the Malleus maleficarum that singles out visible women with knowledge and power as uniquely dangerous, it becomes a newly threatening idea that women have this ability that's recognized and given status in communities.
- [18:09]
C
So the profession of midwife had a relatively low status in the early modern period, sort of, you know, 1500 onwards, generally, because you're dealing with bodily fluids, you're dealing with things that are messy, you're dealing with noises, you're dealing with pain. So, you know, it's something which is incredibly important and valuable. But it also means that the profession status is quite low. So in Bavaria, for example, women are looked down on even by the barber, we're told, by the knacker, by the executioner. And the midwife's son could be excluded from a trade guild because of his mother's occupation. So that tells you quite a lot about the idea about reproductive health, about sex, about gender and about the process of childbirth, which, you know, in today's day and age, people take a slightly different view about what natural birth should be like, with crystals playing in the background and how you should embrace nature. And that rich chain of that connects every woman to all of our human ancestors. But at this time, there's a sort of scorn, I think, for the ways in which anything that's done, that evolves, noises, fluids, et cetera, should be out of sight and out of mind.
- [19:17]
B
It's the realm of women. So men, you know, are not invested in it. I mean, obviously everyone you would think is invested in the future reproduction of society. But the work of midwifery is women's work, women's domain, women's issues. That's how it's conceived. Until our friend Kramer, the author of Malleus Maleficarum gets involved. Because Peter, he is obsessed with midwives. It's a real fixation and you can see why, given his worldview, and this is a world in which women have access to other women's bodies, to new life. And into the heady soup of his imagination comes the idea that midwives are using this status to basically get access to infants they can sacrifice to Satan. So I'm just going to read a line from Thomas Middleton's the Witch, which really captures the fears that were prevalent in society about what midwives might be doing with this access there. Take this unbaptized brat, boil it well, preserve the fat. You know, tis precious to transfer anointed flesh into the air in moonlight nights or steeple tops. And this incredibly visceral image of a midwife boiling a baby alive so that she could use its fat for satanic rituals, it doesn't really get more emotive than that, does it, Peter?
- [20:39]
C
Sounds a bit like Qanon. You know, there's been lots of these kind of social media groups over recent years that, you know, accuse Democrats of doing that. And Democrats may be responsible for lots of things, but I'm pretty sure that they don't do this on a regular basis of child sacrifice. But you know, it's an idea that then perpetuates. Once you find people like Middleton writing this down in a place called the Witch, and people see it, it normalizes it, it means that you think it must be happening and that drives that frenzy of making accusations and then having trials. And I suppose you could relate that to that age of suspicion. For example, during the Second World War when the Nazis invaded lots of countries all over Europe, particularly in France, where the letters of denunciation that people write about their neighbors, it's a double thing that gets done. One is that you give vent to all your crazy ideas, but also you do it because you don't want anybody to accuse you. So that sort of era of suspicion, of persecution becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy because people talk about it, it becomes something that people think must be normal. And then it makes things much and much, much worse. And but I'm interested AFW about ideas about midwifery and low status and how that carries on up until very recently as well. Tell us a bit about that.
- [21:58]
B
Yeah, well, there are lots of ideas surrounding childbirth that are very superstitious and that feed into this fear, really, that people hold. And, of course, I think even today, childbirth is a very humbling experience. It's really the most animal I've ever felt. It's. You feel like you have control of your body and you live in this modern era, and childbirth brings you right back to your primordial elements as a mammal, you know, it's really. It's quite a unique thing to go through. And, of course, midwives are the people who specialize in guiding you through that. You know, that is what they know how to do. So they are connected with a different side of life than most people experience day in, day out. And so there are all these ideas that then surround that. So one is the idea of changelings. In fact, there was recently, I think it was on Apple, a kind of supernatural TV series about changelings. It's an idea that's never really lost its currency. But in the medieval era, there was this real belief that midwives could be stealing newborn babies and replacing them with changelings who are supernatural creatures that are on Earth to commit bad deeds. So the real innocent baby is given to the devil, and it's replaced with this changeling. And that was actually often used as an explanation for children who had birth defects or mental illness, you know, that they'd been switched at birth. And, of course, who has access to the newborn baby at birth? The midwife. And then there are other things surrounding birth that actually still very resonant in many cultures. For example, the umbilical cord. You know, we know now the medical power of the umbilical cord. What an incredible piece of human engineering. It is also the amniotic membrane. And in many African cultures, for example, if a child is born with the amniotic membrane intact, it's believed to be an omen that denotes that that child has special significance, you know, that has a greater connection to the supernatural realm. And that that, in the cultures that I'm aware of is not. Is seen as a. A thing of awe. It's positive. It denotes the kind of special status. But in this frenzied atmosphere of looking for things to pin on midwives, it's also regarded as a kind of sign that there's something supernatural and nefarious at work. So the midwife's power and access and her ability to understand Things that other people don't understand singles her out in this era. And you can see how they're able to kind of take these ideas and construct them into something that's this coherent ideology around Satan and giving things to Satan and swapping things with Satan and generally creating mischief on earth. And, you know, the only bit of this I understand, Peter, that like, makes sense to me is that there is a lot of mischief on earth and it would be nice if there was a simple explanation for it. You know, this person is the reason why we're suffering and why there's so much evil at work. You know, why things that seem to be bad are happening and why innocent people suffer and why there's injustice and why there's poverty and death and all of these things. I think we always have a tendency to look for an easier explanation or worse, a scapegoat. And that's what midwives become.
- [25:16]
C
I think it's because it's a one size fits all. It sort of avoid, you know, it's just. It's just neat packaging. It allows you to have a simple explanation, as you say, for complex problems, and you can wrap everything into it. So, for example, in one text written in the 1620s called the Anatomy of Melancholy, it talks about how witches and magicians cause melancholy. And, you know, just. I'm going to read this out to give you an idea of what it is that witches are responsible for. They hurt and infect men and beasts. Vines, corn, cattle, plants. On top of that, they make women abortive and to not conceive or be barren. They make men and women unable to join up in union together. They make their body flay in the air. They stop people from meeting together. They steal young children out of cradles. They have voices that come out of nowhere. They put deformed bodies in rooms. The whole thing, it's kind of bonkers because you're trying to find one person who's responsible for everything.
- [26:12]
B
But also, like many strange conspiracy theories, there's always a grain of truth. So, you know, one of the things we talked about in the last episode is that women who've been doing healing for hundreds of years do know how to manage reproductive health. You know, they do know how to cause an abortion or they do know how to create contraceptive devices. And so the. The idea that a woman could have power over that is actually real and threatening to people who don't want women to have that power. And so you can see how that you can take this, like, one fact and then spin it and, you know, put all these other completely fantastical ideas on top of it. And at the same time, this is a world where, you know, as we said earlier, childbirth is very precarious. There's really high rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, so newborn babies are dying. You know, there are stillbirths, there are miscarriages, there are maternal deaths. And again, I think it maybe is comforting to think, actually, instead of this being suffering and sorrow, that's really hard to explain. It's her fault. She did it in her conspiracy of 200 other witches who meet at night and sign pacts on the devil's anus, like, obviously, that's the better explanation.
- [27:27]
C
Well, you know, when we did Dickens, I remember after we talked about how Charles Dickens walked around London and saw dead children, infants laid out on the pavement, because infant mortality was so rife. So I suppose for that reason, where you have a mother or a child or both who died during childbirth, then the midwife has a precarious position, not just because she's an expert and understands how maternal health care and fertility and reproduction works, but because there's death that's associated quite often in these worlds. And so I suppose that they'd be able to say that this is the fault of a midwife who has caused the death of people or has changed the children round and swapped them for a dead one, I suppose. I'm not sure whether it's a grain of logic to it. I think that's being generous. I think it's more that it's a world which is extremely precarious and life is cheap and short. And so finding that kind of narrative to explain what's going on, you see this peak in the early 1600s. What's really interesting is in Europe, the rhythms don't work the same way. So the Protestant and Catholic parts of Europe, the levels of persecution for witchcraft are about the same. After about 1600, they are almost double in Catholic parts of Europe than they are in Protestant ones. And there are, I guess, lots of different potential explanations for that, maybe healthcare, sanitation, education, et cetera. It could be that the Reformation sees the way that women have higher levels of agency, perhaps, than elsewhere. But it's a kind of constant in this period until witchcraft suddenly stops being an issue and the persecution, women sort of just slows down and stops. But it is all there, the idea about sorcery, about devil worship and about the materials associated with birth and infants.
- [29:12]
B
And what I find interesting is how even later, so in the 17th century, otherwise quite rational people still hold onto these ideas. So, for example, the one of the most famous French midwives, Louise Bourgeois, writes a textbook for midwives, you know, about the practice and her knowledge. But even there, she warns her colleagues in midwifery that they should never keep the call. You know that membrane that I talked about earlier, that some children are born with it intact, because if you keep it, it could be taken by sorcerers and used for spells. So people, you know, even in a more professional context, still worry about this. And these risks are taken so seriously, Peter, that right up until the 18th century in England, the oath for midwives indicates, you shall not in any wise use or exercise any manner of witchcraft, charm or sorcery. So the fact that these statements are showing up right up into the early modern period just show how deeply ingrained this suspicion of midwives has become in European culture. The new Wegovy pill is now available through weight watchers. Powerful GLP1 results in a simple pill at the lowest price available. And with Weight Watchers, you can get doctor support and personalized nutrition programs. See if you qualify@weightwatchers.com adnot reviewed or.
- [30:35]
E
Approved by Novo Nordisk.
- [30:47]
C
I wonder, Afra, how that relates to the modern world today, particularly to do with how we think about midwives, about childbirth, reproductive health, and what the legacies are of persecutions and demonization of women for their inability to bring every single pregnancy to term and for the, you know, the ways in which some of the things we've been talking about have scarred the legacies of European history.
- [31:12]
B
Well, it's so interesting, Peter, because after the period we've talked about and this kind of witch hunt frenzy, birth becomes more and more medicalized and men start infiltrating this previously female domain using new techniques for delivering breech babies and suturing tears. It becomes increasingly medicalized to the point that now I think most women listening to this would find going to a hospital and being treated by a physician who, majority of whom still are male, like the first port of call. But what's so interesting is that I feel as if there's disillusionment with the medicalization of birth. You know, we still have, especially for some communities, high rates of maternal mortality. In the uk, for example, black women in England continue to face disproportionately poor outcomes in maternal care. Babies that are black or black British, Asian or Asian British have more than 50% higher risk of perinatal mortality.
- [32:10]
C
That's amazing.
- [32:11]
B
Babies born to white women, these are really quite extreme.
- [32:13]
C
That's amazing.
- [32:15]
B
And so a lot of minoritized women are starting to question whether actually the medical establishment really is the safest place for them to give birth. Now I know that this is really fraught territory and I'm not saying that we should discount modern science and that you shouldn't give birth in a hospital. I guess what I'm pointing to is the fact that people are now starting to get more curious about these older ancient women led traditions. And so if you look at what's happening with doulas, for example, doulas who draw on African or Latin American Caribbean, other practices are really starting to be sought out by women. I mean, some of the celebrities I follow really champion these doulas that they credit with. You know, whether it's in collaboration with kind of conventional western medicine in a hospital and your doula is there, or women who want home births and they want doula led birth and they specifically want people who are tapping into those ancestral traditions. And I think it's so interesting, it's almost like we're now coming full circle where those traditions were so demonized and vilified in the western world and that led to outcomes that weren't necessarily for women, you know, because the way men persecuted female midwives and women who had older birthing traditions, it wasn't for the good of women, you know, it was in, it was in pursuit of these very specific ideologies. And I think women are now beginning to say, if we had a blank slate and we could design birth experiences that actually serve us, keep us safe and our babies safe, and help us feel centered and grounded and looked after, is this what we design, this kind of medical profession that's predominantly male led, where as I've just said, certain communities have really, really disproportionately poor outcomes. So I think it's worth thinking about in the context of this history and the way midwives in particular were persecuted that now, and I think it's taken till now that we're starting to actually look at that history and ask what that could be useful has been lost throughout those centuries of persecution.
- [34:18]
C
I mean, my assumption is that having looked at some of that research is that a lot of it's to do with low income levels and parts of the country which are deprived, that medical outcomes and health outcomes across the board are significantly worse. But I mean, what's interesting, you know, even with language, that idea about doulas, we know there's a lot of correlation, we know there's lots of research done on how even modest increases in the coverage of Midwife delivered interventions could avert 22% of maternal deaths, which is unbelievable. More than a fifth of neonatal deaths and 14% of stillbirths. That's more than a million deaths a year by 2035. Even that label, doula, you know, it's from an ancient Greek word meaning a female slave. So the idea that you're somebody's doula is that, you know, there's, I guess, two ways of looking at that. One is that you are there to help them and therefore you are being their doula because you're, after all, you're not pregnant yourself, you're not the one that at risk and therefore you're in the subservient position. But equally, there's a way in which that label is about creating a hierarchy that places the midwife at an inferior level of expertise rather than someone who's really leading through the process. So, you know, I think it'd be interesting, afraid to hear particularly your opinions and your views about how non European ideas work about women, about women health, women's healthcare, about witchcraft, about medicalization. Because most of this episode we've spoken about what happens in Europe and to know how similar, how different that is from other parts the world.
- [35:49]
B
Yeah, we have been very Europe centered. And you know, there's a reason for that because of course, this, the history of European colonization means that the European perspective and European ideas now get exported and imposed often by force throughout the world. So what is the impact of that on indigenous cultures? What is the culture that they're clashing against and what is the history of those cultures and what parts of their legacy of women in healing have survived? So we are going to look at that in detail, Peter, on the next episode of Legacy.
- [36:22]
C
Thanks for listening to Legacy.
- [36:24]
B
Don't forget to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast player. And you can also watch all our episodes on YouTube so make sure you're subscribed there too.
- [36:32]
C
And of course we're on all the socials, all the links are in the show notes for this episode or just search Legacy podcast. I'm Peter Frankopan. I'm Aforhash and we'll see you for the next episode of Legacy.
- [37:01]
D
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