Women applied various methods to remedy different disorders in late antiquity and early imperial China. Some healed the ill by shamanistic prayers and charms, some helped their patients with physical therapies such as massage and exercise, and others cured the sick with herbal medicine. They treated ulcers, wounds, diabetes, and reptile poison. But most often they relieved their fellow sisters from various ailments concerning reproduction, including infertility, pregnancy problems, childbirth complications, and postpartum maladies. These women either acquired fame and respect within their neighboring communities or got access to higher society withìn the aristocracy for their techniques and knowledge. Women obtained healing abilities through various means. Female shamans were endowed with healing capacity by supernatural power while midwives and many childbirth-related women healers may have come to master their skills through life experiences. Although the process whereby women learned materia medica and other medical techniques, such as acupuncture and moxibustion, was less clear than for their other healing abilities, extant documents suggest that women acquired these techniques and knowledge, which later became orthodox definition for Chinese medicine, either through family heritage or by exchanging life experiences with other women. Nevertheless, women encountered obstacles in their practice as healers. First,while composing their medical texts, male doctors of the sixth and seventh centuries, though seldom present at childbirth scenes, except for complications, accused women midwives of disturbing the natural process of delivery. Second, although shamanistic healings never disappeared and were sometimes applied by medieval Taoist medical doctors in treating their patients, it was however gradually removed from "orthodox" medical practice during its formation in the seventh century. Granted that witch-hunts and comparable tragedies of medieval Europe never occurred in medieval China, women's healing opportunities still dwindled somewhat when female shamans were either distrusted or executed. Third, extant documents suggest that both Taoist and Buddhist nuns practiced healing before the seventh century. But, both were outlawed by the Tang government during the establishment of official medical examinations. Meanwhile, in shaping up the "orthodox" medical practices, official regulations embraced the learning of medical texts of materia medica, acupuncture and moxibustian, and excluded physical therapies such as massage and exercise, two crafts practiced most often by women healers.