When a medical field goes underdiscussed and unexamined the way that women’s urology has, the resulting knowledge vacuum attracts all sorts of peculiar theories to fill it, and peculiar people to go with them: doctors who are less concerned with healing patients than in using them to support a pet hypothesis about, say, the physical manifestation of female masochism as urinary complaints. Berthold Schwarz, the psychiatrist who attended chronic cystitis patient Agnes in 1958, was one such person: he was convinced, along with his case study coauthor Bowers, that her condition was largely
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