All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

by Elizabeth Comen

But the emotion I encounter most in the examination room, more potent and insidious than fear, is shame.

The women who apologize to me for being sick are part of a medical legacy, passed down over hundreds of years and still visible today.

Western medical storytelling has largely eschewed the discussion of women’s bodies, let alone elevated them as powerful, capable, or of equal worth to men’s. In the medical history that defines women’s “normal” bodily functions—as well as their pain, pleasure, strength, and intellectual capacity—the voices of women themselves are notably absent.

Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of the Witches.

One recent study revealed that women operated on by men have significantly worse outcomes, including death, than when operated on by women. (As for the men, their outcomes were the same whether a man or woman operated on them.)

Honestly not surprised

We need to stop apologizing for our medical needs, and start asking the questions that lead to better knowledge, better health, and better lives. We need to ask how to cultivate a relationship with our bodies that is not just comfortable, but joyful; how to know when something isn’t right and to advocate, not apologize, for our needs; how to navigate a healthcare system that will never be perfect but could be better; how to be as assertive, as informed, and as confident in the care we deserve in a doctor’s office as we are in the rest of our lives.

Today, the practice of cosmetic medicine is one that walks the line between empowering women to control their bodies and trapping them in a gilded cage of punishing beauty standards.

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

Jfc.

And what are we to make of the competing notions that beauty is the most superficial and shallow of pursuits, while at the same time being the greatest asset a woman can have?

Recent years have seen a 40 percent increase in women having labiaplasties; even ten years ago, it was practically unheard-of.

Omg.

Labiaplasty no doubt has its roots in culturally loaded notions of a “civilized” vulva versus a “savage” one, dating back to the eighteenth century, when the enlarged labia of some African women were christened the “Hottentot apron” and presumed to be a sign of race-specific sexual depravity.

the worst thing about bicycles was that women could, and would, use them to masturbate.

Every time I think men can't get any more stupid, they prove me wrong.

“It is perfectly conceivable that under certain conditions the bicycle saddle could both engender and propagate this horrible habit,” he wrote.

Good lord

In this room, her strength and speed and stamina will not benefit her, because what these doctors intend to determine is not whether she’s strong enough to run against the world’s fastest women. What they intend to determine is whether she’s a woman at all. And when they render their verdict, it will be a loss like none other. Not just of opportunity, but identity—stripping the runner of her womanhood as easily as they stripped her of her clothes.

“A Medical History of the Olympic Games” devotes only a few brief lines to women, but they are telling: “There has been concern for a number of years that among the more successful female competitors many would be found who exhibited male characteristics, and who might be pseudohermaphrodites,” it reads, citing the need to confirm the sex of women athletes via genital examination.

Fucking SICK

the Female Triad: disordered eating, irregular menstruation, and loss of bone density.

left untreated, it can lead to serious long-term consequences including infertility, stress fractures, a compromised immune system, a slowed metabolism, cardiovascular damage, and mental health issues.

And in this moment, perhaps more than at any other time in history, women are hungry for change.

Menstrual blood, breast milk, vaginal discharge, urine: to be a woman, it seemed, was to be constantly discharging fluid, particularly from one’s genitals.

Ngl it feels like it sometimes

Lucy. Betsy. Anarcha. We know the names of the enslaved women upon whom Sims operated, but their voices are silent; no first-person account of their experience survives, in all likelihood because none was ever made to begin with.

Such is the nature of so much medical progress: at the intersection of experimentation and exploitation, healing and harm, desperation and innovation, a solution suddenly breaks through.

To prevent masturbation, he recommended marriage as a prophylactic measure—ideally as soon as a girl hit puberty.

Disgusting

As recently as 2015, researchers were still seriously investigating the possibility that women’s political views are impacted by their menstrual cycles. They aren’t, for the record—but

So damn dumb

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.

those sterilized included “unwed mothers, prostitutes, petty criminals and children with disciplinary problems”—but not, one notes, unwed fathers or men who solicited sex workers.

populations: beginning in the 1930s in Puerto Rico, nearly one-third of all women between the ages of twenty and forty-nine were forcibly sterilized as the result of a population control program supported by the US government. And in the 1970s, the Indian Health Service sterilized thousands of Native American women, nearly halving their birth rate within the next ten years.

The US government is fucked in the head

the rate of maternal mortality in the United States is ten times that of other developed countries, with poor and minority women disproportionately affected.