Women’s Herbal Wisdom Through History

Healers, wise women, and herbalists across the centuries — the largely untold story of who actually kept plant medicine alive

There is a version of herbal history that centers on famous men and famous texts — Hippocrates and Dioscorides and Galen, Ibn Sina and Culpeper and the great herbalists of the Renaissance. That history is real and worth knowing.

But it tells only part of the story. And in some ways it misses the most important part.

For most of human history, in most of the world, the person you called when someone in your household was sick was not a physician. It was a woman. The woman who kept a garden. The older woman in your village who had seen it all and knew what to make for a fever. Your mother, your grandmother, your neighbor, the midwife who had attended every birth in the community for thirty years. These were the herbalists. These were the keepers of plant knowledge. And almost none of their names were written down.

This article is about that other history — the mostly unwritten, frequently suppressed, occasionally celebrated, and always persistent tradition of women’s plant knowledge. It is about the women whose names we know and the far larger number whose names we don’t. It is about what was preserved, what was lost, and what survived against considerable odds to reach us today.

If you feel drawn to herbalism, there is a very good chance you are part of this lineage. The question of where that pull comes from — why plants, why healing, why this — may have more historical roots than you realize.

The Ancient World: Healers Before History

In virtually every ancient culture, healing and plant knowledge were understood as belonging to the feminine sphere. This is not sentiment — it is documented across archaeological sites, ancient texts, and the mythological traditions that preserve cultural memory.

In ancient Egypt, healing was practiced by both men and women, but the goddess Isis was the divine healer, and women held significant roles as physicians and practitioners. The Edwin Smith Papyrus and the Ebers Papyrus — two of the oldest medical documents in existence, dating to around 1600 BCE — describe herbal treatments that were practiced in household and temple settings, many of which were the domain of women.

In ancient Greece, the goddess Artemis was associated with herbs and healing in the wild, and Hygieia and Panacea — daughters of the god of medicine Asclepius — were goddesses of health and healing. More practically, Greek households relied on women for the management of illness, and there is evidence of female physicians in the ancient world despite the formal exclusion of women from most public life.

Agnodice of Athens:
According to the Roman writer Gaius Julius Hyginus, Agnodice was an Athenian woman who disguised herself as a man in order to study medicine in Alexandria in the fourth century BCE. She became a practicing physician, eventually revealing herself as a woman when accused of seducing patients. She was put on trial, at which point her female patients testified so forcefully on her behalf that the law excluding women from medical practice was changed. Whether or not every detail of this account is accurate, it reflects the reality that women who sought formal medical knowledge in the ancient world faced significant barriers.

In ancient Rome, women managed the medical care of their households as a matter of course. The Roman matron was expected to know her herbs — to grow them, prepare them, and administer them. This was not considered medicine in the formal sense; it was housekeeping. And in that framing lies one of the great ironies of women’s herbal history: their knowledge was so ubiquitous, so woven into the fabric of daily domestic life, that it was simultaneously everywhere and invisible.

The Medieval Period: Monasteries, Households, and Wise Women

In medieval Europe, herbal knowledge lived in two main places: the monastery and the household. Both were, in different ways, domains where women’s knowledge flourished.

The Monastic Tradition

Medieval monasteries were the primary centers of formal learning in Europe, and their gardens — the physic gardens where medicinal herbs were grown — were tended by monks and nuns alike. Abbesses and learned nuns were among the most educated people of their time, and some produced significant herbal and medical writing.

The most remarkable of these is Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess whose work stands as one of the most original contributions to medieval medicine by anyone of any gender.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)
Hildegard was a Benedictine abbess, mystic, composer, and natural philosopher who wrote two major medical works: Physica, a catalog of natural things including hundreds of plants and their medicinal properties, and Causae et Curae, a work on the causes and treatments of disease.

What makes Hildegard remarkable is not just that she wrote — though that alone was unusual for a woman of her time — but that her medical thinking was genuinely original. She developed her own energetic framework for understanding health and disease, described the concept she called viriditas — the greening power, the vital force that animates all living things — and connected the health of the human body to the health of the natural world in ways that feel startlingly contemporary.

She is today recognized as a Doctor of the Church and remains one of the most studied figures in medieval medicine. Many of her herbal recommendations, examined by modern researchers, have proven to have genuine pharmacological basis.

Hildegard is exceptional in that her name and work survived. But she was not alone. Across medieval Europe, women in convents and monasteries accumulated plant knowledge, grew medicinal gardens, cared for the sick in infirmaries, and passed their knowledge to one another through practice and oral tradition. Most of them left no written record.

The Household Healer

Outside the monastery, the primary keeper of herbal knowledge in medieval Europe was the woman of the household. In a world without professional medicine available to most people — where physicians were expensive, rare, and often not particularly effective — the woman of the house was the first and usually the only line of healthcare for her family and community.

She grew her herb garden, dried and stored her herbs, knew what to make for a cough and what to give a child with fever and what to apply to a wound. She attended births and deaths. She was called on by neighbors who needed help. Her knowledge was practical, accumulated over a lifetime, and transmitted to the daughters and nieces who watched her work.

This knowledge was rarely written down. It was learned by doing, passed by showing, and remembered in the hands and the senses rather than on the page. This made it simultaneously resilient — it survived because it was everywhere — and vulnerable, because it could be lost when the chain of transmission was broken.

Wise Women and Village Healers

In rural communities across medieval and early modern Europe, there was a recognized role for women with particular expertise in plant medicine and healing. These women were known by various names in various places — wise woman, cunning woman, herb wife, village healer — and they occupied an important and sometimes precarious position in their communities.

They were the people you went to for a difficult birth, for a child who wouldn’t thrive, for the illness that the household remedies hadn’t touched. They knew the stronger herbs and the more complex preparations. They sometimes worked at the edges of what their communities considered acceptable — their knowledge powerful enough to inspire both gratitude and suspicion.

The relationship between wise women healers and the Church was complicated. Plant knowledge and spiritual practice were deeply intertwined in the pre-Christian traditions of Europe, and that intertwining did not disappear with Christianization — it went underground, or was quietly accommodated within Christian practice, or survived in forms that looked enough like folk custom to avoid official attention. The wise woman who whispered a charm over a poultice was doing something that looked different from the nun who prayed over a patient in the infirmary, but the practical herbal knowledge involved was often the same.

The Witch Trials: The Cost of Women’s Knowledge

The history of women’s herbal knowledge cannot be told without confronting what happened to it between roughly the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.

The period of witch trials and witch hysteria — concentrated most intensely in the late fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries but extending beyond that in both directions — resulted in the execution of tens of thousands of people, the majority of them women. Historians continue to debate exactly who was targeted, why, and how herbal knowledge specifically was implicated. What is clear is that the figure of the herbalist — the woman who knew plants, who attended births, who worked at the boundary of nature and healing — was exactly the profile that made a woman vulnerable to accusation.

The infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth-century witch-hunting manual, specifically named midwives and healers as particularly suspect. The knowledge of plants that could affect fertility, birth, and death — knowledge that was genuinely part of the village healer’s practice — was reframed as evidence of diabolical power.

A note on the historical complexity:
The relationship between witch trials and herbalism is often simplified in popular accounts, sometimes to the point of distortion. Not everyone who was accused was an herbalist. Not all herbalists were accused. The trials were driven by complex political, social, religious, and economic factors that varied significantly by time and place. What is true is that independent women with specialized knowledge — including plant knowledge — were among those most vulnerable to accusation, and that the cumulative effect of the persecution was a significant disruption to the transmission of traditional women’s healing knowledge in Europe.

The long-term effect of this period on women’s herbal practice is difficult to measure precisely but impossible to ignore. Women who had openly practiced as healers became more cautious. Knowledge that had been shared relatively freely became more private, more hidden, more carefully passed. Some of it was lost entirely when the women who held it were killed or when the fear of prosecution broke the chains of transmission.

What survived did so largely because it went underground — preserved in household practice, in the work of midwives who continued their work quietly, in the kitchens and gardens of women who kept their knowledge to themselves and passed it to their daughters in whispers.

The Seventeenth Through Nineteenth Centuries: Professionalization and Exclusion

The formal professionalization of medicine in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries created an entirely new set of barriers for women healers. As medicine organized itself into licensed professions, universities, and professional associations, women were systematically excluded from the formal training and credentials that defined a legitimate practitioner.

This did not stop women from practicing. It redefined what they did as not medicine — as folklore, as superstition, as the inferior knowledge of uneducated women — in contrast to the superior, credentialed, scientific knowledge of male physicians.

The irony of this is significant. In many cases, the herbal practices of traditional women healers were more effective for common ailments than the heroic medicine — bleeding, purging, toxic mercury compounds — practiced by formally trained physicians of the same period. The midwife whose hands-on skills and herbal support produced good birth outcomes was dismissed as a primitive practitioner even as physician-attended births sometimes had higher mortality rates due to poor understanding of infection.

Elizabeth Blackwell (1707–1758 (Scottish herbalist, not the physician))
Not to be confused with the first woman to receive a medical degree in America, the Scottish Elizabeth Blackwell was a botanical illustrator and herbalist who produced A Curious Herbal in 1737-39 — a beautifully illustrated compendium of medicinal plants that she drew, engraved, and colored herself. She undertook the project to pay her husband’s debts while he was in debtor’s prison, working from the Chelsea Physic Garden in London.

Her work was both practically useful — it was used by apothecaries and physicians — and a remarkable achievement for a woman working in a field from which women were largely excluded. It was republished in Germany with expanded text and remained in use well into the nineteenth century.

The Eclectic and Thomsonian Traditions in America

In nineteenth-century America, two botanical medicine movements — Thomsonianism and the Eclectic school — created somewhat more space for women than mainstream medicine did. Samuel Thomson, who developed his botanical system in the early 1800s, explicitly intended his practice to be accessible to ordinary people, including women, as a form of self-care and household medicine. Thomsonian practice spread rapidly through the American frontier, carried in significant part by women who used it to care for their families.

The Eclectic physicians, who developed their own tradition of botanical medicine drawing on both European herbal knowledge and Indigenous American plant use, trained women as physicians in numbers that mainstream medical schools did not. The Eclectic colleges were more open to women students, and a number of women practiced as Eclectic physicians in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The Work of Lydia Pinkham

Lydia Estes Pinkham (1819–1883)
Lydia Pinkham developed her Vegetable Compound — a herbal formula for what she called “women’s complaints” — in her kitchen in Lynn, Massachusetts, initially giving it away to neighbors who needed it. When the family fell into financial difficulty, she and her sons began marketing it commercially, making it one of the most successful patent medicines of the nineteenth century.

What made Pinkham distinctive was not just the product but her direct engagement with women who used it. She answered letters from women who wrote to her with their health questions — thousands of them — treating them as intelligent people capable of understanding their own bodies. Her marketing materials were written directly to women, in women’s language, about women’s experiences.

Her formula contained botanicals — black cohosh, life root, unicorn root, pleurisy root, and fenugreek seed — that had genuine traditional use for the conditions she addressed. The product made her wealthy and famous. It also made her a target of intense criticism from the medical establishment, which objected both to her claims and to the very idea of a woman publicly advising other women on health.

The Twentieth Century: Recovery, Revival, and Reclaiming

The early and mid-twentieth century were not, by most accounts, a flowering time for women’s herbal wisdom. Pharmaceutical medicine consolidated its dominance, traditional plant knowledge was increasingly dismissed as unscientific, and the household herbal practices that had survived into earlier generations largely skipped a generation or two as families turned to the medicine cabinet instead of the herb garden.

But the knowledge did not disappear entirely. It persisted in particular communities — in the South and Appalachia, among immigrant communities who brought their plant traditions with them, in African American communities where plant medicine had been kept alive through necessity and inheritance, among Indigenous communities who maintained their traditions against enormous pressure.

And then, beginning in the late 1960s and gathering through the 1970s and 1980s, something shifted.

The Herbal Revival

The counterculture of the late 1960s brought with it a renewed interest in traditional knowledge, self-sufficiency, and alternatives to mainstream medicine. Herbalism was part of that wave, and women were central to its revival. The feminist health movement of the 1970s explicitly connected women’s reclamation of their health to the recovery of traditional plant knowledge.

The book that more than any other brought women’s herbal knowledge into the hands of ordinary women in this period was “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” first published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1970. It was not primarily an herbal text, but it carried the spirit of women reclaiming knowledge about their own bodies that had been taken from them — the same spirit that animated the herbal revival happening alongside it.

Juliette de Baïracli Levy (1912–2009)
Juliette de Baïracli Levy was a British herbalist who spent decades traveling among nomadic peoples — Roma, Bedouin, Indigenous communities across the Americas — learning traditional plant knowledge directly from the people who held it. Her books, including The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable and Herbal Handbook for Everyone, brought traditional herbalism to a wide popular audience beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the herbal revival of the 1970s.

She believed passionately in the knowledge held by ordinary people — not in academic texts or formal medicine — and her life was a sustained argument for the value of traditional, experiential plant knowledge. She is considered one of the founding figures of the modern herbal revival.

Rosemary Gladstar (1945–present)
Rosemary Gladstar is often called the godmother of American herbalism. She began studying herbs in the 1960s under traditional herbalists in the Appalachian tradition, opened one of the first herbal apothecaries in the United States in 1971, and founded the California School of Herbal Studies in 1978 — one of the first herb schools in America.

She has taught tens of thousands of students, written numerous influential books, and through her organization United Plant Savers has worked to protect native medicinal plants from overharvesting. Her approach — warm, practical, deeply rooted in traditional knowledge, and explicitly connected to women’s healing wisdom — has shaped American herbalism more than almost any other single figure.

Her influence can be felt in the approach and values of this membership library.

The African American Healing Tradition

No account of women’s herbal wisdom in America is complete without centering the profound contributions of African American women healers — contributions that have been systematically overlooked in mainstream herbal histories and that deserve full recognition.

Enslaved African people brought with them deep knowledge of the medicinal plants of West and Central Africa, and in the brutal conditions of American slavery, that knowledge became a matter of survival. Healing in enslaved communities was largely the work of women — the root doctors, conjure women, and granny midwives who combined African plant traditions with knowledge of Indigenous American plants and whatever other resources were available to them.

These women worked under conditions of extraordinary oppression, often without access to the herbs they knew, adapting their knowledge to new plants in a new landscape, passing what they knew to their daughters in stolen moments. The midwives among them attended virtually all births in their communities and in many cases in white households as well — their skills sought and relied upon even by those who denied their full humanity.

The Granny Midwives
The granny midwife tradition in the American South — primarily carried by African American women — maintained birth practices and herbal knowledge that bridged African traditions, Indigenous American plant knowledge, and generations of accumulated clinical observation. These women attended births, supported postpartum recovery, cared for infants and mothers, and served as the primary healthcare providers for Black communities in the rural South well into the twentieth century.

Their forced displacement by professionalized obstetrics in the mid-twentieth century — a process that was often coercive and explicitly racist — resulted in the loss of a significant body of traditional knowledge. Efforts to document and honor this tradition have been growing, and its influence on contemporary herbalism, particularly in the South, is being increasingly recognized and celebrated.

The root worker and conjure traditions of the American South, practiced primarily by African American women, integrated plant medicine with spiritual practice in ways that were deeply rooted in West African religious and healing traditions. These were complete systems of healing — physical, spiritual, and communal — that survived slavery, Jim Crow, and sustained cultural suppression.

What Was Lost and What Survived

Honest accounting of this history requires sitting with what was lost. The witch trials, the professionalization of medicine, the suppression of Indigenous and African traditional knowledge, the simple break in transmission that happens when one generation turns away from the old ways — all of these cost us something that cannot be fully recovered.

Specific plant formulas, preparation methods, the deep experiential knowledge of particular plant–body relationships built up over generations in particular places — much of this is gone. We know enough to know we are missing things we can’t name.

And yet. Herbalism survived. Women’s plant knowledge survived. Not intact, not complete, but alive — passed on in kitchens and gardens, through community networks, in the practices of midwives and granny healers, in the writings of the women who managed to get their knowledge onto the page, in the living traditions of cultures that held on to what they knew.

The contemporary herbal renaissance — which is real and remarkable — is in significant part the work of women recovering and reviving and building on what survived. The teachers, writers, and practitioners who shaped modern American herbalism are overwhelmingly women. The students who fill herb schools and herbal memberships are overwhelmingly women. This is not coincidence. It is lineage.

You Are Part of This

If you are here — in this library, learning herbs, feeling that pull toward plant medicine that brought you to this practice — you are part of this story.

You may have had a grandmother who kept herbs. A great-aunt who knew what to make when someone was sick. A mother who grew certain plants in the garden and could tell you what they were for. Or you may have had none of that — a lineage interrupted, knowledge skipped, the chain broken somewhere. That too is part of this history.

Either way, what you are doing now — learning plant names and actions and preparations, developing a direct relationship with herbs, building the knowledge that allows you to support your household’s health — is a continuation of something very old. You are not starting from nothing. You are rejoining a river.

The women whose names we know — Hildegard, Lydia Pinkham, Juliette de Baïracli Levy, Rosemary Gladstar — and the far vaster number whose names we don’t: the granny midwives of the South, the wise women of medieval Europe, the household healers of ancient Rome, the women in every culture who tended the sick and kept the plant knowledge alive — they are all part of the lineage you are walking into.

Carry it well.

For most of human history, the keeper of plant knowledge was a woman.
Her name was rarely written down.
Her knowledge survived anyway — in kitchens and gardens,
in the hands of midwives, in whispers between mothers and daughters.
You are the continuation of that.
This practice has always belonged to people like you.

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The information provided on this website is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Herbal remedies can affect individuals differently and may interact with medications or medical conditions. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before beginning any new herbal regimen, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medications, or have a medical condition.

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