Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

by Maya Dusenbery

“The theory of female frailty obviously disqualified women as healers,” Ehrenreich and English write. “At the same time the theory made women highly qualified as patients.” The economic self-interest driving doctors’ growing concern about women’s health was not lost on some of the few female doctors who’d broken into the profession by the end of the nineteenth century. As Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi wrote drily in 1895, “I think, finally, it is in the increased attention paid to women, and especially in their new function as lucrative patients, scarily imagined a hundred years ago, that we find explanation for much of the ill-health among women, freshly discovered today.” But, of course, many women didn’t make lucrative patients. Conveniently enough, nineteenth-century “science” showed that black women and working-class white women were magically resistant to the health problems that plagued well-off white women. One physician noted, “The African negress, who toils beside her husband in the fields of the south, and Bridget, who washes, and scrubs and toils in our homes at the north, enjoy for the most part good health, with comparative immunity from uterine disease.” In a remarkably lucky boon to the new medical profession, it was only those women who had the time and the money to be treated who were prone to perpetual illness and in need of their services. And it was only women trying to push into professional work—those aspiring bacteriologists, histologists, and surgeons—who...