‘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

The Traitor and the She Wolf by David Adkins

Isabella, daughter of King Philip IV of France, marries the new English king, Edward II, at the tender age of thirteen. Although it was an arranged marriage, young Isabella has high hopes of nurturing a loving relationship with her handsome new husband. But these dreams are gradually eroded, as Edward reveals his narcissistic traits and preference for sharing his bed with his favourite, Piers Gaveston. Instead, he ignores and humiliates her.

Roger Mortimer is a young lord, a landowner of the Welsh Marches. At Isabella’s coronation, he is instantly taken with her beauty and intelligence, and makes an instant connection with her, eventually leading to love.

It is not long before the barons of the land become dissatisfied with the weak and unfair administration of Edward, and the country falls into a protracted period of unrest. Roger himself struggles with his allegiance to the king alongside his growing sense of protection towards Isabella. When Edward’s new favourite, Hugh Despenser, has Mortimer imprisoned and seizes control of the royal children, Isabella can take no more, and all the love she tried to give to Edward is replaced with a burning desire for revenge.

The Traitor and the She Wolf is a fictionalised account of real historical events and reveals how loyal and loving people can be driven to do things they never imagined.


see also The Tudor Saga

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

Medieval Bodies: Life, death and art in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnell

From Church Times:

This is an ambitiously interdisciplinary study, combining medicine, history of art, and with a seasoning of theology. It is extravagantly illustrated in colour. The result is a readable and often successful attempt to impose an orderly framework on this account of a vast range of matters.

The book begins with a long general chapter on medieval bodies, sketching the realities of medieval life in terms which expect no prior knowledge, and touching rather lightly on religion, philosophy, and medical science. The sources of medical help for the sick are covered, from the academic study emerging in the new universities, to a variety of practical and charlatan assistance.

The book works its way, chapter by chapter, from the head to the senses, and to skin, bone, heart, blood, hands, stomach, genitals, and feet, with a con­cluding chapter on “future bodies”.

Gladiator Blood and Liquid Gold: Good for What Ails You?

From Medpage Today:

Surprisingly, some modern treatments have roots in deadly ancient practices.

"Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways To Cure Everything", Lydia Kang ... 

"delves into some of the wacky but true ways that humans have looked to cure their ills. Leeches, mercury, strychnine, and lobotomies are a few of the topics that explore what lengths society has gone in the search for health."

"As far-fetched and strange as they sound, some things in the book do have some utility in modern day medicine, albeit in a very narrow way," Kang observed.

"We often don't get to study medical history in our education," Kang added. "It's grounding to figure out why some of these treatments were accepted from both a societal point of view and a chemical perspective."

read more here @ Lydia Kang's website