Medical history is written by men

These are the reasons given for women being admitted to a mental hospital in the USA in the 1860s.

A friend posted this on Facebook in a group devoted to history. A lot of the contributors to the group are men and a lot of them regularly put up very interesting documents. This document was posted by a female member of the group and it attracted disbelief and in a few cases ridicule. Surely, wrote one man, this was a 'made-up list.' 

It's hard to know where to start with this. Because I'm old, I take it for granted that people know their own social history. They will surely realise that 1864 is pretty much the pre-scientific age. That the Ancient Greeks started a tale that went round the western world for a couple of millennia claiming that women were the victims of their uterus, which wandered around the female body, affecting the woman's temperament and, of course, making her unreliable as a witness or a head of household or someone capable of managing her own affairs. Surely people know that almost all medical doctors

back then were men and all trained in the same pre-scientific way. Surely people have heard the tales of women's medical conditions being dismissed as imagination or hysteria. 

Good grief, Florence Nightingale, the founder of battlefield medicine, came back to London from the Crimea where diseases like brucellosis were endemic terribly ill and was incapable of doing very much for the following 40 years. Was she diagnosed with a physical illness? Not a bit of it: she had a 'nervous' illness, according to all the (male) doctors who saw her. 

It has taken a long time - and a change of personnel, to the point where more than half the medical trainees in the UK are now women - to persuade doctors that 'heavy periods' accompanied by appalling pain can be a symptom of endometriosis. Back in the day (50 years ago), one of my school friends almost lost her place to study Physics and Maths at Glasgow University because she was too ill to sit the national exams. This highly intelligent academic was advised by her doctor to get married and have a baby (in that order, of course). That would clean out the uterus and the pain would disappear. By the time she got proper treatment, her uterus was so damaged she was unable to have children. 

Among women today, it's a standing joke (we're a crude lot left to our own devices) that if men had to undergo a cancer test that involved crushing their testicles between glass plates and x-raying them, a better way would be found to do these things. Yet women are still subjected to the mammogram, which looks and feels like a form of medieval torture. Not to mention the awfulness of the smear test. Even nowadays, it feels as if medical procedures for women have to involve 'discomfort' (that's what medics call pain). Ask any woman who has had a D&C. 

There are still changes that need to be made. If nothing else, the treatment of women for heart complaints needs to be on an equal footing with the treatment of male patients, now that we're finally admitting that heart disease is not a totally male preserve. 

Maybe we're getting there, although I would suggest that you should never, ever allow a doctor - male or female - to draw blood. You'll be bruised from here to hell and back. Nurses do that - painlessly and with aplomb.