![]() Conversely, researchers said that the menstrual cycle, and varied release of hormones throughout the cycle in rodents, introduced too many variables into a study, therefore females could not be studied.ĭiseases presenting differently in women are often missed or misdiagnosed, and those affecting mainly women remain largely a mystery: understudied, undertreated and frequently misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Still, medicine persisted with the belief that all other organs and functions would operate the same in men and women, so there was no need to study women. To medical minds, this represented another difference between men and women, overtaking the uterus as the primary perpetrator of all women’s ills. In the early 20th century, the endocrine system, which produces hormones, was discovered. Because women had reproductive organs, they should reproduce, and all else about them was deemed uninteresting. ![]() But the fallout of this difference is that for a long time medicine assumed it was the only difference. Our reproductive organs were the greatest source of difference to men – and because they were different, they were mysterious and suspicious. Medicine has always seen women first and foremost as reproductive bodies. Dr Janine Austin Clayton, an associate director for women’s health research at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), told the New York Times that the result is: “We literally know less about every aspect of female biology compared to male biology.” Not only have doctors, scientists and researchers mostly been men, but most of the cells, animals and humans studied in medical science have also been male: most of the advances we have seen in medicine have come from the study of male biology. One of my favourite examples is that in some of the first sketches of skeletons, male anatomy artists intentionally made women’s hips look wider and their craniums look much smaller as a way of saying: ‘Here is our evidence that women are reproductive bodies and they need to stay at home and we can’t risk making them infertile by making them too educated, look how tiny their heads are.’ And we see that again and again.” ![]() Historically, Young says, men have made “the medical science about women and their bodies, and there is an abundance of research evidence about the ways in which that knowledge has been constructed to reinforce the hysteria discourse and women as reproductive bodies discourse. One male GP said to me: “I’ve never had a fibromyalgia patient who wasn’t batshit crazy.” ![]() And it is not just endometriosis patients treated this way. Nobody suggests that endometriosis is not a real disease, or is somehow imagined, but there is a general feeling in medicine that women’s reaction to having endometriosis is somehow hysterical, especially when symptoms prevail after treatment has been offered, which is common. One gynaecologist said to Young: “Do mad people get endo or does endo make you mad? It’s probably a bit of both.” Another said: “There’s a lot of psychology, just as much as there is pathology. In her work, Young has shown how endometriosis patients are often viewed by their treating doctors as “reproductive bodies with hysterical tendencies”. Moralising discourses surround those who rebel they are represented as irrational and irresponsible, the safety net for medicine when it cannot fulfil its claim to control the body.” “Rather than acknowledge the limitations of medical knowledge, medicine expected women to take control (with their minds) of their disease (in their body) by accepting their illness, making ‘lifestyle’ changes and conforming to their gendered social roles of wife and mother. “The historical hysteria discourse was most often endorsed when discussing ‘difficult’ women, referring to those for whom treatment was not helpful or who held a perception of their disease alternative to their clinician,” Young wrote in a research paper published in the journal Feminism & Psychology.
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