Something to think about on the Licensing Issue.

We must be careful not to let our current appetites steal away

any chance we might have for a future feast. Jim Rohn

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"The establishment of medicine as a profession, requiring university

training, made it easy to bar women legally from practice. With few

exceptions, the universities were closed to women (even to upper class

women who could afford them) and licensing laws were established to

prohibit all but university-trained doctors from practice. It was

impossible to enforce licensing laws consistently since there was only a

handful of university-trained doctors compared to a mass of lay healers.

But the laws could be used selectively. Their first target was not the

peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed

for the same urban clientele as that of the university-trained doctors.

...In the witch-hunts, the Church explicitly legitimized the doctors'

professionalism, denouncing non-professional healing as equivalent to

heresy: "If a woman dare to cure without having studied she is a witch

and must die." (Of course, there wasn't any way for a woman to study.)

Finally, the witch craze provided a handy excuse for the doctor's

failings in everyday practice: Anything he couldn't cure was obviously

the result of sorcery."

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-Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

by Barbara Eherenreich and Deidre English