The Dark History of Medicine's Mistreatment of Women with Elinor Cleghorn
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What is the modern problem of gender bias in medicine and why does it matter?
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You're listening to the Nocturnous Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. In the last few years, the medical profession has been grappling with the problem of gender bias in medicine, with how the symptoms of women are seen as atypical or worse, are minimized, dismissed, or ignored. But where did this problem come from? How far have we come and where should we go from here? That is the subject of Dr. Eleanor Clegghorn's book, Unwell Women, Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. Eleanor is a freelance writer and researcher with a background in feminist culture and history. Her critical writing has been published in Screen and other academic journals. She's given talks and lectures at the British Film Institute, Tate Modern, and ICA London, and has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 show The Forum.
Her creative writing about her experience of chronic illness was shortlisted for the Fitz Coraldo Edition's Essay Prize in 2017, and her nonfiction debut, Unwell Women, was published in June of 2021. She lives in Sussex in the United Kingdom. Before we spoke, I asked Eleanor to read an excerpt from her book. Here is Eleanor.
We are taught that medicine is the art of solving our bodies' mysteries and And we expect medicine as a science to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality. We want our doctors to listen to us and care for us as people. But we also need their assessments of our pain and fevers, aches and exhaustion to be free of any prejudice about who we are. We expect and deserve fair and ethical treatment regardless of our gender or the colour of our skin. But here things get complicated. Medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. The history of medicine, of illness, is every bit as social and cultural as it is scientific. It is a history of people, of their bodies and their lives, not just of physicians, surgeons, clinicians and researchers, and medical progress has not just marched forward in laboratories and benches, lectures and textbooks.
It has always reflected the realities of the changing world and the meanings of being human. Gender difference is intimately stitched into the fabric of humanness. At every stage in its long history, medicine has absorbed and enforced socially constructed gender divisions. These divisions have traditionally ascribed power and dominance to men. Historically, women have been subordinated in politics, wealth and education. Modern scientific medicine, as it has evolved over the centuries as a profession, an institution, and a discipline, has flourished in these exact conditions. Male dominance and with it the superiority of the male body was cemented into medicine's very foundations laid down in ancient Greece.
In the third century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle described the female body as the inverse of the male body, with its genitalia turned outside in. Women were marked by their anatomical difference from men and medically defined as faulty, defective, deficient. But women also possessed an organ of the highest biological and social value. The uterus. Possession of this organ defined the purpose of women to bear and raise children. Knowledge about female biology centred on women's capacity and duty to reproduce. Being biologically female defined and constrained what it meant to be a woman. and being a woman was conflated with and reduced to the female sex. Medicine validated these social determinants by constructing the myth that a woman was her biology, that she was ruled by it, governed by it, at the mercy of it.
Women's illnesses and diseases were consistently related back to the secrets and curiosities of her reproductive organs. The mystical uterus influenced every conceivable disorder and dysfunction of her body and mind, and ever since, medical knowledge about women's susceptibility to illness and disease has been shaped and distorted by prejudiced beliefs that possessing a uterus defines our inferior position in the man made world.
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