An early 1970s left feminist interpretation of Malleus Maleficarum is the centerpiece of this essay by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English. It sets the tone for a dark story of the co-optation by men of medicine as practiced by women from the earliest times and the subsequent alienation, persecution, and subjugation of such women with the rise of the male-dominated “medical profession.” The tragic irony of this tale is that all the good about that profession came from the independent “wise women” of olde.