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One recent study revealed that women operated on by men have significantly worse outcomes, including death, than when operated on by women.
If soldiers whose faces had been torn away by bursting shell on the battlefield could come back into an almost normal life with new faces created by the wizardry of the new science of plastic surgery, why couldn’t women whose faces had been ravaged by nothing more explosive than the hand of the years find again the firm clear contours of youth? —Max Thorek, MD, plastic surgeon, 1943
Doctors re-christened the condition of small-breastedness with the scary-sounding medical term “micromastia,” which quickly became ubiquitous in medical reference books and textbooks. Twenty years after Gerow and Cronin persuaded Timmie Jean Lindsey to let them place implants in her chest, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons petitioned the FDA to deregulate silicone implants as a matter of medical necessity, describing small breasts as not just a deformity but a disease: “There is a substantial and enlarging body of medical information and opinion, however, to the
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Many people, not unreasonably, thought that the triumph of feminism would relegate beauty to a back seat so far as its importance in a woman’s life was concerned. But the power of beauty is unconquerable as love or death. —J. Howard Crum, MD, 1929
But the legacy of those early days is still with us—including in the process whereby a woman’s normal, healthy body is pathologized as a deformity in need of a surgical fix, and where the “ideal” is based as much as on what men desire as what women want.
One woman, Sarah Baartman, was brought to England by surgeon Alexander Dunlop and displayed naked in public—or, for select wealthy families, brought to their homes, where patrons could pay to touch her. The indignity inflicted on Baartman persisted even after her death: instead of being buried, her remains were displayed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, along with a wax mold of her labia.
It is possible to deplore the pressures that women feel to conform to a stereotyped standard of beauty, while at the same time defending their right to make their own decisions. —Marcia Angell, MD, editor in chief, New England Journal of Medicine, 1992
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, medicine had been captive to the idea of the male default: men’s bodies were the healthy standard. Women’s bodies, in their differences, represented deviations from the ideal.
All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. —Gustave Le Bon, MD, 1879
“Without doubt,” Le Bon concluded, “there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.”
Darwin himself weighed in on this topic, noting that women’s physiology appeared “characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization”; man, he wrote, was necessarily destined to achieve “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can women—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.”
At the center of the debate surrounding female athletes was an impossible, and preposterous, question: How athletic could a woman be before she didn’t count as a woman anymore?
“A woman’s arrhythmic risk varies according to her menstrual cycle,” Khan explains. “When your estrogen peaks during ovulation, it’s not only body temperature that goes up; the heart rate goes up, too, by about two to four beats. Meanwhile, we’re at the lowest level of estrogen and progesterone right before the period starts, and that’s the time that women are more likely to have arrhythmias.”
Today, a woman is still more likely to call an ambulance in response to her husband’s heart attack than she is to call one for her own.
“I do not wish to imply that woman is inferior to man,” he once wrote. “She is his superior in her own sphere. She does not rise as high as man in intelligence and creative power nor does she fall so low. She always pursues the middle course always.”
some estimates suggest that 10 percent of all women in the US will suffer a nonfatal strangulation incident in their lifetimes.
The self-deprivation engaged in by Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century was, in its less extreme iterations, a common practice within medieval religious communities—but also a gendered one. Men who claimed to be incapable of eating were few and far between; fasting was a woman’s game, and, in medieval Europe, the best way for them to prove their spiritual bona fides. The less you ate, the holier you were. Catherine, who ate nothing at all, was canonized as a saint.
Sugar was omnipresent, creating a paradox that persists today: women were expected to gravitate toward sweet foods but also to exercise immense restraint when it came to consuming them in order to remain slim.
“What I wish to emphasize is that there is no problem of ‘mind’ versus ‘body,’ because biologically no such dichotomy can be made,” he wrote in 1943. “The dichotomy is an artefact; there is no truth in it, and the discussion has no place in science in 1943 . . . The difference between psychology and physiology is merely one of complexity. The simpler bodily processes are studied in physiological departments; the more complex ones that entail the highest levels of neural integration are studied in psychological departments. There is no biological significance to this division; it is simply an
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No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree. —W. C. Fields, circa 1940
the average of mental power in man must be above that of women. —Charles Darwin, 1896
The female also is more subject to depression of spirits and despair than the male. —Aristotle, The History of Animals, Book IX: fourth century BC
As a general rule, all women are hysterical. And every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria. —Augustin Fabre, MD, 1883
Charcot claimed that a hysterical woman could be treated by applying pressure to parts of the body he called “hysterogenic zones,” which sounds scientific enough in theory but translated in practice to punching his patients in the ovaries.
By 1952, approximately fifty thousand patients in North America had undergone lobotomies, with some four thousand of those performed by Freeman himself.
estrogen. The latter, which regulates the female menstrual cycle, was discovered—and named—in 1920. Its etymology is telling: it comes from the Greek oistros. It means “mad desire.”
It’s one of those things that feels true; if hormones are responsible for shaping all the other biological differences between men and women, it makes a certain kind of sense to assume that those differences permeate all the way to the brain. And yet that assumption is flawed: many of the studies purporting to prove the existence of innate differences between male and female brains not only fail to replicate but stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of just what hormones do to women.
As of this writing, several European countries have dialed back their medical protocols for providing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to trans-identified minors, citing a troubling lack of data on long-term outcomes and apparent risk of serious side effects; in the US, where trans medical care has become an inflection point in the culture wars, the conversation is even more fraught.
Aristotle summed up the medical view of women’s bodies best when he said, “We should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.”
Galen, whose anatomical studies in the second century BCE shaped the medical understanding of human bodies for centuries to come, was especially influential in promoting the idea that women were fundamentally incorrect in the way their bodies were assembled; he marveled that while women have exactly the same organs as men, they are imperfectly turned inward.
Everything that is peculiar to her springs from her sexual organization. —John Wiltbank, MD, introductory lecture in midwifery at Philadelphia College, 1853
It was 1869 when Storer waxed poetic to his peers about what an honor it was to attend to women’s health. Just three years later, in 1872, his own wife died alone and terrified in the asylum where he’d had her committed for “catamenial mania”—menstruation-induced insanity.
In Freud’s view, clitoral orgasms were the hallmark of an immature, unactualized woman who was repressed by childhood sexual fantasies; instead, he said, women should forgo clitoral stimulation and aspire only to vaginal orgasms, an anatomically illiterate concept that he had essentially invented out of a combination of wishful thinking and thin air.
While you and i have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with?
