I have been thinking a lot about the history of care and what becomes possible when we take the time to remember the people and practices that came before our modern healthcare systems. That was the focus of a recent book circle and art-making session inside the Evolved Living Collaborative, where we explored Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English through an occupational therapy and occupational science lens. The live gathering has already happened, but the recording and classroom materials are now available inside the community so you can explore the conversation at your own pace. This is one of those topics that I think deserves more than a single conversation. A Forgotten Lineage of Occupation Long before occupational therapy became a profession, people were using everyday occupations to care for themselves, their families, and their communities. Growing food, preparing remedies, weaving, sewing, making pottery, caring for children, attending births, preparing meals, and gathering around shared work were not necessarily separated into the categories we use today to describe healthcare, leisure, productivity, or self-care. They were simply part of living. These occupations helped people survive, connect with one another, pass knowledge between generations, and create meaning within their communities. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses gives us an opportunity to look at what happened when many of these community-based traditions of care came into conflict with increasingly professionalized and institutionalized systems of medicine. Women healers and midwives were not simply forgotten as modern medicine developed. Their knowledge and authority were challenged, restricted, and displaced in ways that were deeply connected to gender, class, and institutional power. That history raises questions that still feel relevant today. Who gets recognized as a legitimate knowledge holder? Whose knowledge becomes evidence? Who gets paid for care? What happens to forms of care that do not fit neatly into professional or institutional structures? These are not just historical questions. So What Does This Have to Do With Occupational Therapy? For me, this is where the conversation becomes especially interesting. Occupational therapy emerged alongside movements that recognized the therapeutic potential of meaningful activity, including the moral treatment movement and the arts and crafts movement. There was an understanding that doing matters. Making matters. Connection matters. The environments in which we live matter. Human beings are not simply bodies carrying diagnoses. We are people living through occupations, relationships, communities, environments, routines, and meaning. And yet, within modern healthcare, many of the things that make occupational therapy distinctive can become difficult to see. Our craft-based roots can become secondary to productivity metrics. Relational work can become difficult to quantify. Psychosocial and community-based occupations can be pushed aside when healthcare systems prioritize what is easiest to measure. Sometimes I think we have become so accustomed to explaining occupational therapy through the language of the medical system that we forget how unusual some of our roots actually are. That is one of the questions I wanted to create space for in this classroom session. What might happen if we became more familiar with the histories of care, craft, community knowledge, and everyday occupation that existed before our profession had a name? Why Revisit This Now? This feels particularly important at a time when so many people are experiencing burnout and disconnection from the systems that are supposed to support health. Clinicians are being asked to do more with less. Communities are struggling with access to care. Insurance structures can make meaningful services difficult to obtain. Healthcare workers are navigating staffing shortages, productivity expectations, and systems that do not always leave much room for relationship or creativity. At the same time, people continue to care for one another outside of formal institutions. People cook for their neighbors. They grow gardens. They make art together. They share skills and knowledge. They create mutual aid networks. They teach one another traditional practices. They gather around tables and find ways to make life a little more livable. None of this replaces regulated healthcare when regulated healthcare is needed. But I think it is worth paying attention to the fact that people have always created ways of caring for one another, particularly when formal systems have not been able to meet every need. Occupational therapy has an interesting place within this conversation because occupation connects individual health with the environments, relationships, communities, and everyday activities that make up a person’s actual life. What We Explored Together In the 90-minute classroom session, we used Witches, Midwives, and Nurses as a starting point for thinking about the relationships between women’s knowledge, folk practices, craft, community care, and the development of occupational therapy. We also created art together. The Window Between Worlds activity invited us to think symbolically about the people, practices, and forms of knowledge that may have been pushed outside of official histories of healthcare, while also considering what knowledge we might want to carry forward. The session includes reflections on selected passages from the book, connections to occupational therapy history, conversation about relational and community-based knowledge, and an opportunity to consider what reclaiming meaningful occupations might look like in our own communities. You do not need to have read the entire book to engage with the session. You also do not need to arrive with a particular interpretation or a perfect understanding of the history. The classroom is meant to be a place to think, question, make, and explore together. Access the Classroom Inside the Evolved Living Collaborative The recording and classroom materials from Reclaiming the Roots of Care are now available inside the Evolved Living Collaborative. Once you join, you can access the links to the text and audio versions of Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, along with the workshop recording and the creative activity we explored together. The community is also becoming a place for ongoing connection around occupational science, occupational therapy, creativity, and meaningful occupation. We are hosting weekly craft nights, Coffee & Co-Occupation gatherings, and a monthly Journal Club, along with other conversations, workshops, and opportunities to learn together. I created this community because I wanted a space where occupational therapists, students, educators, researchers, occupational scientists, creatives, and interdisciplinary collaborators could explore ideas together without everything having to become another formal course or professional development requirement. Sometimes we need to study something. Sometimes we need to talk about it. Sometimes we need to make something with our hands while we think. And sometimes we just need other people who are curious about the same questions. The Evolved Living Collaborative is free to join. You can join the community here. Want to Go Deeper? If you are interested in tracing the threads of occupation across generations, I also explored some of these ideas in my podcast episode, Weaving the Threads of Our Occupation. That conversation gets into why I have become so interested in intergenerational occupational histories and in looking beyond the official timelines we are often given when we learn the history of our profession. Because I do not think our professional history begins when someone first wrote down the words “occupational therapy.” The story is much older than that. There are threads connecting us to the people who made, cared, taught, gathered, adapted, and passed knowledge from one generation to another. I think there is something powerful about remembering those threads. A Closing Reflection The history of care is not only found in hospitals, universities, and professional textbooks. It can also be found in kitchens, gardens, workshops, homes, community gatherings, and in the hands of people teaching other people how to do something that matters. Occupational therapy has a complicated history, and I am not interested in romanticizing that history or pretending that everything that came before modern healthcare was inherently better. I am interested in asking what we might learn when we widen the story. What knowledge was preserved? What knowledge was lost? Who was allowed to become an expert? Who was excluded? And what might we want to reclaim without simply recreating the past? For me, that is where this conversation becomes exciting. Maybe remembering our roots is not about going backward. Maybe it gives us more possibilities for imagining what care could become. 🌿 The classroom session is available now inside the Evolved Living Collaborative, along with the book and audio resources and opportunities to keep exploring these questions together. 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