Plato: Women in the Ideal State - Part V
The Principle

Having given a clear example of opposite differences (bald vs. hairy) that are not relevant to qualifications for a pursuit (cobbling), Plato then draws a general principle that explains our intuition about that example;

The differences that matter to the qualifications for a pursuit (e.g. a job, a profession, a responsibility) must actually have an impact on the pursuit in question. Being bald or hairy has no logical or practical connection to cobbling (shoemaking). Plato now gives an example of a sameness of nature, in which the opposition of differences does have impact on the pursuit. The example involves the qualifying characteristics of a physician. A person who seeks to perform as a physician should also be a person who has the knowledge and skill of a physician (one who is in mind a physician). Knowledge of the physician's craft is relevant to the pursuit of the physician. Most other differences between individuals are not relevant to the pursuit of the physician; not baldness, not shoe size, and not appearance. When your life is on the line, you want the person who knows what to do. Other differences will be trivial, if that person is qualified to save your life. The relevant opposition of differences in this case is knowledge of healing vs. ignorance of healing.

"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 the licensing laws consistently since there was only a handful of university-trained doctors compared to the great 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.

Take, for example, the case of Jacoba Felicie, brought to trial in 1322 by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, on charges of illegal practice. Jacoba was literate and had received some unspecified "special training" in medicine. That her patients were well off is evident from the fact that (as they testified in court) they had consulted well-known university-trained physicians before turning to her. The primary accusations brought against her were that she would cure her patient of internal illness and wounds or of external abscesses. She would visit the sick assiduously and continue to examine the urine in the manner of physicians, feel the pulse, and touch the body and limbs.

Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all." (Ehrenreich, Barbara and English, Deirdre, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1972).

This is the complete inverse of Plato's argument. Knowledge and skill at healing are of the nature of being a physician. Gender and matters of appearance have no weight at all, by Plato's principle.

Ehrenreich and English argue that the long and brutal persecution of women healers in Europe and America resulted in the modern dominance of men in medicine; a situation that is only now starting to change.

Next, Plato applies his principle to the situation at hand, the status of women in the ideal State.

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