‘It’s infuriating and shocking’: how medicine has failed women over time

From The Guardian:

Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, believed that women were controlled by their uteruses. The father of modern gynecology, James Marion Sims, in the mid-19th century experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia, convinced that they felt less pain than white women. (Until its removal in 2018, his statue stood in New York’s Central Park for over a century.) Doctors claimed that women’s suffrage would cause injury to women’s fragile bodies and diminished minds. Such examples cast an abhorrent pall over “first, do no harm”.

The history of medicine is every bit as social and cultural as it is scientific, and male dominance is cemented in its foundations. But even the author Elinor Cleghorn, who spent the past year immersed in the history of women’s relationship to medicine, was surprised by “just how conscious and insidious it was”, she told the Guardian. “Biological theories about female bodies were used to reinforce and uphold constraining social ideas about women.”

Cleghorn’s new book, Unwell Women, enumerates a litany of ways in which women’s bodies and minds have been misunderstood and misdiagnosed through history. From the wandering womb of ancient Greece (the idea that a displaced uterus caused many of women’s illnesses) and the witch trials in medieval Europe, through the dawn of hysteria, to modern myths around menstruation, she lays bare the unbelievable and sometimes horrific treatment of women for millennia in the name of medicine.

read more here @ The Guardian

The King's Midwife : A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray by Nina Rattner Gelbart

This unorthodox biography explores the life of an extraordinary Enlightenment woman who, by sheer force of character, parlayed a skill in midwifery into a national institution. In 1759, in an effort to end infant mortality, Louis XV commissioned Madame Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to travel throughout France teaching the art of childbirth to illiterate peasant women. For the next thirty years, this royal emissary taught in nearly forty cities and reached an estimated ten thousand students. She wrote a textbook and invented a life-sized obstetrical mannequin for her demonstrations. She contributed significantly to France's demographic upswing after 1760.

Who was the woman, both the private self and the pseudonymous public celebrity? Nina Rattner Gelbart reconstructs Madame du Coudray's astonishing mission through extensive research in the hundreds of letters by, to, and about her in provincial archives throughout France. Tracing her subject's footsteps around the country, Gelbart chronicles du Coudray's battles with finance ministers, village matrons, local administrators, and recalcitrant physicians, her rises in power and falls from grace, and her death at the height of the Reign of Terror. 

At a deeper level, Gelbart recaptures du Coudray's interior journey as well, by questioning and dismantling the neat paper trail that the great midwife so carefully left behind. Delightfully written, this tale of a fascinating life at the end of the French Old Regime sheds new light on the histories of medicine, gender, society, politics, and culture.

further reading:

New York Academy of Medicine - biography

New York Times: Baby Boom

Excerpt: The King's Midwife

Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Dena Goodman

The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe edited by Hilary Marland

Diagnosing Giants by Philip A. Mackowiak

Diagnosing Giants: Solving the Medical Mysteries of Thirteen Patients Who Changed the World traces the history of medicine through the illnesses of some of the most influential figures of the past. Standard biographies all too often pay scant attention to the health issues that affected their subjects. 

Yet, the diseases suffered by these figures had profound effects on their lives and their legacies. Each chapter opens with a detailed medical history of the patient. Facts relevant to the historical figure's life and legacy are woven into the case summary, and the mystery patient's identity is revealed at the conclusion of the case summary. The author then analyzes the medical history, offers a differential diagnosis and a final diagnosis. Where relevant, the potential effects of the subject's medical problems on his or her life and legacy are discussed.

Blood and bodies—the messy meanings of a life-giving substance

From PHYS ORG:

A collection of essays explores understandings of a vital bodily fluid in the period 1400-1700. Its contributors offer insight into both theory and practice during a period that saw the start of empiricism and an overturning of the folklore that governed early medicine.

In 1628, William Harvey, physician to James I and alumnus of Gonville & Caius College, made a discovery that changed the course of medicine and science. As the result of careful observation, he deduced that blood circulated around the body. Harvey's discovery not only changed the way blood was thought to relate to the heart but revolutionised early science by demanding that human physiology be examined through empirical observation rather than philosophical discourse.

This turning point, and its profound repercussions for ideas about blood, is one of many strands explored in Blood Matters: Studies of European Literature and Thought,. A collection of Essays, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson (English Faculty, Cambridge University) and Eleanor Decamp, it examines blood from a variety of literary, historical and philosophical perspectives.

see also: University of Pennsylvania Press

Women Surgeons of World War I

From the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons:

Focusing on four women surgeons who made their way to war. Agnes Bennett and Lilian Cooper worked for the Scottish Women's Hospitals near the Serbian front. Conditions were incredibly harsh but both women acquitted themselves well. They returned to successful careers in New Zealand and Australia respectively.

Lilian Cooper was also our first female FRACS. Feminist Phoebe Chapple went to France in 1917 and while attached to the Queen Mary's Auxiliary Army Corps, was one of a handful of women to win the Military Medal. Vera Scantlebury was 28 when she arrived at the Endell St Military Hospital in London. Her diaries (held by the University of Melbourne Archives) record the evolution of a young and inexperienced doctor to a competent surgeon. Vera Scantlebury (Brown) was later fêted for her pioneering work in infant welfare.

see inside book here @ Explore our Women Surgeons of World War 1

read more here @ State Library of Victoria - Women's War Work

The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman

From Penguin Random House:

Meredith Wadman’s masterful account recovers not only the science of this urgent race, but also the political roadblocks that nearly stopped the scientists. She describes the terrible dilemmas of pregnant women exposed to German measles and recounts testing on infants, prisoners, orphans, and the intellectually disabled, which was common in the era. These events take place at the dawn of the battle over using human fetal tissue in research, during the arrival of big commerce in campus labs, and as huge changes take place in the laws and practices governing who “owns” research cells and the profits made from biological inventions. It is also the story of yet one more unrecognized woman whose cells have been used to save countless lives.

From Star2:

The book weaves its way around the morally ambiguous and morally repugnant history of vaccines, from their commercialisation – something that was quite unusual at the time, and which brought Hayflick a lot of flak, ultimately derailing his career – to the horrific testing and experimentation carried out on people without their knowledge.

Despite writing an entire book on the subject, Wadman suggests that rather than revile the actions of the scientists of the past, we should take the opportunity to look at what is being done at the moment.

Heartline by Brendan David Carson

A little bit of gratuitous book plugging for a facebook friend, Brendan David Carson:

One doctor's first few years - in the emergency department, in psychiatry, in the prisons and on the public methadone programme. Unexpected births, sicknesses, deaths - and two or maybe three resurrections. What board games they play in the hereafter, the health department protocol for vampire hunting, when not to call the psychiatrist and why not to buy a used car from an Emergency doctor. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy for psychiatric illness, the death of Supergirl - and what it feels like to be responsible for somebody's death. 

This is my record of a few years in which my life changed a lot, working as a wide-eyed junior doctor in emergency departments, in psychiatric wards, and on the state's largest methadone programme. Names and dates and identifying characteristics have been changed, but everything I've written here is true. 

Visit Amazon to check out Brendan's book in paperback and kindle formats.

A fascinating look at the history of toxicology

The first two volumes in the History of Toxicology and Environmental Health Series, edited by Philip Wexler, describe toxicology in antiquity. This new book continues the story by covering the approximate period between 400AD and 1600AD. It consists of 16 chapters written by contributors from various institutions in Europe, the Middle East and North America.

The book ...... [ delves ] into different aspects of toxicology, such as the contributions of scientific scholars of the time, sensational poisoners and poisoning cases, as well as myths. Historical figures, such as the Borgias and Catherine de Medici are discussed. Toxicologists, students, medical researchers, and those interested in the history of science will find insightful and relevant material in this volume.

read more here @ the Pharmaceutical Journal and @ Elsevier

read book here @ Science Direct

Victorian Doctors Thought Reading Novels Made Women "Incurably Insane"

Now there's a traffic-stopper of a headline!  Reading makes you - young women - insane.  But not just insane, but "incurably" insane.  Well, lead me to Bedlam!

Read some excerpts from this devilishly insane article from History Buff:

In 1886, homeschooling pioneer Charlotte Mason wrote that “the girl who sits for hours poring over a novel to the damage of her eyes, her brain, and her general nervous system, is guilty of a lesser fault of the nature of suicide.” Strange as it may sound, Mason's belief that reading fiction was physically dangerous for girls and women was actually held by many medical doctors of her day. 

A few years earlier, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg—the same guy who invented corn flakes in an attempt to "cure" people of masturbation—called novel reading “one of the most pernicious habits to which a young lady can be devoted. When the habit is once thoroughly fixed, it becomes as inveterate as the use of liquor or opium.”

Read entire article here @ History Buff and learn more about Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) here @ All Day.