Overview

The film reviews the pages of the history of medicine in which healing was integrally linked to ritual acts and incantation, paying particular attention to the image of the woman as the practitioner of magical functions. At the start of the wave of witch trials in Europe that lasted from the 16th to the 18th century, women with knowledge of medicine and midwifery were persecuted, while the right to proclaim the truth was given over to the Church, and subse- quently – modern medicine and science, which was mainly controlled by men. Also denigrated as witches were women who didn’t fit into the accepted social order, because, for example they were unmarried or did not have children. Witches were perceived as the embodiments of evil. They were feared and hated, because people believed that years of blight and pestilence, illnesses and still-born children were their handiwork.