‘It’s infuriating and shocking’: how medicine has failed women over time

From The Guardian: In the eye-opening new book Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn uses her own misdiagnosis at the hands of male doctors as a jumping point for an alarming history lesson.

Cleghorn’s new book, Unwell Women, enumerates a litany of ways in which women’s bodies and minds have been misunderstood and misdiagnosed through history. From the wandering womb of ancient Greece (the idea that a displaced uterus caused many of women’s illnesses) and the witch trials in medieval Europe, through the dawn of hysteria, to modern myths around menstruation, she lays bare the unbelievable and sometimes horrific treatment of women for millennia in the name of medicine.

read more here @ The Guardian

Abortion and Contraception in the Middle Ages

From Scientific American:

Today, conversations around abortion in modern Christianity tend to take as a given the longstanding moral, religious and legal prohibition of the practice. Stereotypes of medical knowledge in the ancient and medieval worlds sustain the misguided notion that abortive and contraceptive pharmaceuticals and surgeries could not have existed in the pre-modern past.

This could not be further from the truth.

While official legal and religious opinions condemned the practice, often citing the health of women, a wealth of medical treatises produced by and for wealthy Christian women across the Middle Ages betray a radically different history—one in which women had a host of pharmaceutical contraceptives, various practices for inducing miscarriages, and surgical procedures for the termination of pregnancies. When it came to saving a woman’s life, Christian physicians unhesitatingly recommended these procedures.

read more here @ Scientific American

Mistress of Herbs: Saving Uteruses Worldwide

Recently a racket involving the removal of uteruses from healthy women in Kalaburgi hit the headlines. In the city, however, an Ayurvedic doctor has prevented thousands of women from going under the scalpel. 

Dr Gowri Subramanya, has dedicated her life to educating people about the benefits of ancient Ayurvedic medicines and has treated several women ailing for various issues related to the uterus. She is the granddaughter of Pandith Narasimha Murthy, Palace Vaidya of Mysuru royal family. She resides in Banashankari.

She has successfully treated more than 1,300 women and prevent them from undergoing needless surgeries. Not only people in the country, she boasts of patients even from abroad, from countries like Australia and USA. 

Read More Here @ New Indian Express

No Scrubs: How Women Fought To Become Doctors

No scrubs: how women had to fight to become doctors | Farrah Jarral | Life and style | The Guardian

Women have always been intimately involved in medical matters – and not only through their familiarity with the act of expelling oversized babies from undersized pelvises. In the Middle Ages and beyond, women worked as midwives, nurses, apothecaries, bone-setters and surgeons. Yet, as the study of medicine became formalised, women were increasingly excluded. Henry VIII made a point of this in his 1540 charter forming the Company of Barber Surgeons, forerunner of the Royal College of Surgeons, in which it was decreed “No carpenter, smith, weaver or women shall practice surgery.”

By the mid-19th century, more women were demanding entry to medical school. The British Medical Journal at the time declared: “It is high time that this unnatural and preposterous attempt ... to establish a race of feminine doctors should be exploded.” Men expressed concerns that exposure to gore might pose a risk to delicate female health, apparently oblivious that women deal with blood on a monthly basis.

The first world war allowed women to take up posts in hospitals that would ordinarily have been occupied by men. But despite their competence, female physicians still faced major career obstacles in the interwar period, including discrimination on the basis of their marital status. In 1948, the educational reforms that came with the inauguration of the NHS required that a “reasonable proportion” of medical students were female.

Continue reading article by Farrah Jarral here at The Guardian

Stone Babies

From Authint Mail:

An elderly Colombian woman has been found to have a 40-year-old fetus inside her abdomen.

 Such a medical event is an extremely rare occurrence. It is known as a lithopedion, or a “stone baby”. This is the result of an ectopic pregnancy where a fetus happens to be conceived outside of the uterus.

 There have been only about 300 documented cases of lithopedia in recorded medical literature. The earliest which was recorded happened in 1582. In that event, physicians were performing an autopsy on a 68-year-old woman and discovered she had most likely carried a stone baby for almost 30 years.

 However, archaeological evidence reaches back even farther. There is an example of a “stone baby” which was discovered in a fourth century Roman dig in France.

The medical condition was even discussed by the ancient physician Albucasis in a tenth century dissertation even though he did not know what it was.

See also: Zahra Aboutalib and her Sleeping Baby

Tale of Trotula

Time has not been kind to the woman known as Trotula Plataerius, Trotula di Ruggiero or Trotula of Salerno. Was she the author of the famous 11th century De passionibus mulierum (On the Diseases of Women) or was she a mythical.

Now the controversy continues with this article from :

The first female physician, and the thousand-year campaign against her

These arguments came to a head in the 1500s, when historians and doctors announced that there never was a Trotula in the first place. Since then, she's become a semi-mythical figure. Even those who believe in her existence sometimes doubt her work. The few facts that anyone has pertaining to the woman - that she may have been from a noble family, that she may have had a physician for a husband or a son - have been used to attribute the book to male relatives who used her name as a cover.

See article from

International Journal of Cosmetic Science - Volume 30, Issue 2, pages 79–86, April 2008

(Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2494.2007.00414.x/full )

Among these women, there was Trotula de Ruggiero (11th century), a teacher whose main interest was to alleviate suffering of women. She was the author of many medical works, the most notable being De Passionibus Mulierum Curandarum (about women’s diseases), also known as Trotula Major. Another important work she wrote was De Ornatu Mulierum (about women’s cosmetics), also known as Trotula Minor, in which she teaches women to conserve and improve their beauty and treat skin diseases through a series of precepts, advices and natural remedies. 

See also: Women of History - Trotula Plataerius and Trotula di Ruggiero - The First Beauty Blogger

From Google Books:

The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine edited by Monica H. Green

Trotula and Hildegard: Reflections of Female Medieval Medicine by Christine Dombourian Rinck

Bald Barbie

From Good:

Barbie has proven a controversial figure since her shapely beginnings in 1959, but as time and different civil rights movements have marched forward, Barbie’s image has morphed to include various races and cultures. Now, she’s going bald for a good cause.

Mattel, the makers of Barbie, announced last month that a hairless "friend of Barbie" will "be distributed exclusively to children’s hospitals and other hospitals treating children with cancer throughout the U.S. and Canada, directly reaching girls who are most affected by hair loss." The decision came after a facebook group called "Beautiful and Bald Barbie! Let’s see if we can get it made" scored thousands of "likes" within hours of its creation.

Indigenous “Grandmother” Shamans

From Republica:

Hundreds gathered at Boudhanath Stupa on Sunday to welcome 13 indigenous “grandmother” shamans from across the world to Nepal for their first visit as a group.

The spiritual elders - including Nepal´s Tamang healer, Aama Bombo - are touring Nepal for the 12th gathering of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.  The Council was formed in 2004 to promote alternative medicine, shamanism, indigenous culture, and the urgent need for social change across the globe.

Shamanism is becoming controversial in some sections of the country as more and more people embrace Western medicine.

Obstetric Fistula - Ignored

From Science Blogs:

It’s estimated that up to 3.5 million women currently suffer from fistulas , with somewhere from 50,000 to 130,000 new cases each year–and most of them go untreated. Because many of these happen in rural areas lacking health care providers, it’s difficult to get at exact numbers, and there is little push to obtain them. A woman quoted in Kristof and WuDunn’s “Half the Sky,”  an Australian gynecologist who has worked in Ethiopia for more than 30 years, notes that women with fistulas “are the women most to be pitied in the world…They’re alone in the world, ashamed of their injuries. For lepers, or AIDS victims, there are organizations that help. But nobody knows about these women or helps them.”

To support the World Wide Fistula Fund, click on the WWFF Logo ->> 

Hysteria or The Invention of the Vibrator

From the Examiner:

Hysteria deals with a rather dark period in women's history, and especially that of the medical profession. Set in 1880 Victorian London, where doctors still rely on blood sucking leeches as a regular form of treatment, medical science was even more clueless when it came to the care of women. It didn't help that health care was basically an all boy's club, and that guys knew even less about females than we do now, which is still extraordinarily little. Women were thought to be joyless, sexless creatures. It was either that or they were promiscuous lunatics needing to be institutionalized. There was no middle ground. So when it came to women dealing with common issues like depression, anxiety, or discontentment, guys just conjured up a catch-all by labeling it "female hysteria".

See also: Female Hysteria from wikipedia and The Victorian Era website.

Dr. Salma Maqbool

From the News International:

Dr. Salma Maqbool was the voice of the disabled in this country. After she was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa — an incurable genetic disorder leading to blindness — she took it upon herself to elevate her individual struggle to a bigger sphere. From there started a journey that left an indelible mark on history of social welfare in Pakistan. A young visually impaired female doctor would go on to single handedly establish ‘Darakhshan’, a Vocational Rehabilitation Centre for Women with Disability, develop the National Policy on Disability for the Ministry of Social Welfare, chair the Committee on the Status of Blind Women of the World Blind Union and manage the Pakistan Foundation Fighting Blindness in the capacity of Chairperson. Her proudest achievement however remained the induction of visually impaired in the Civil Services of Pakistan, a first in the 60-year history of Federal Public Service Commission. 

Robin Oliveira - My Name Is Mary Sutter

From Buffalo Rising:

This book is a good suggestion for reading on the occasion starting this year of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and a fitting end to March as Women's History Month. It is the story of one woman who starts out as a midwife and yearns to become a surgeon. Since this was an unlikely occupation for a woman in the mid-1800's, she was rejected time and again from medical school and eventually answers the call of reformer Dorothea Dix to become a nurse just as the Civil War is beginning. She was at first even turned down for that because of the strict social regulations of the time for women and men.

Mary sets off on her own to the front and apprentices herself to a doctor. The story of the Civil War from a medical standpoint unfolds from there. It is not light reading, but her personal story woven throughout exposes the reader to the full scale of how inadequately prepared both the North and South were for real battle, real deaths, and real lifelong injuries.

Vanishing Women of Natural Beauty

I was reading Vincent Akanmode's article " Vanishing Women of Natural Beauty " when I came across this pargraph right at the conclusion:

Physicians in ancient India are reckoned to have used skin grafts for reconstructive works as early as 800 BC, but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that plastic surgery began to gain recognition in Europe and America, with Dr. John Peter Mettaeur as America’s first plastic surgeon of note.

Amazing!

Edmonton Revolutionary: Roberta MacAdams

From the Edmonton Journal:

The Edmonton Public School district announced Friday that it's looking for names for two new schools, one being built in Summer-side-Ellerslie in south Edmonton, the other in the Hamptons-Grange areas of west Edmonton.

Not earth-shattering news, perhaps. But for me, it offers an ideal opportunity to correct a historic injustice, to celebrate the life and contributions of an unsung Edmonton revolutionary: Roberta MacAdams

So why don't we know MacAdams's name? In part, it's because she retired from politics in 1921, after one term. At 40, she married, raised a family, excused herself from public life. She was never one of the Famous Five, who fought the Persons Case. Unlike Nellie McClung or Emily Murphy, she never wrote a book. She was never flamboyant or controversial or ideologically partisan -- just smart, brave, funny, independent and utterly competent.

Trotula di Ruggiero – The First Beauty Blogger

From Colin's Beauty Pages:

The first person to write on the science of beauty was an eleventh century Italian woman called Trotula di Ruggiero (often called just Trotula of Salerno – a bit easier to spell and remember). She worked in Salerno in one of the earliest medical schools. She is most famous as the first person to write about women’s medical problems in De Passionibus Mulierum Curandarum. But her De Ornatu Mulierum (about women’s cosmetics) is just as interesting.

Salerno at the time must have been a fascinating place to operate in. The medical school consciously drew on the traditions of the Arabs, the Jews and the Greeks as well as the local knowledge of herbal beauty treatments. It was also a place where women seem to have played a major role in developing knowledge. The local produce and the sophisticated Mediterranean trade routes also provided a rich variety of raw materials.

Historic Hospital Admission Records Project

From BBC News:

A fascinating and rare set of hospital records dating from Victorian times has been put online.

The records tell the stories of poor, sick children who were admitted to Glasgow Hospital for Sick Children from 1883 to 1903.

It is part of the Historic Hospital Admission Records Project being run by Kingston University in London.

The records give an insight into the common diseases and conditions of Victorian times.

Very few records from children's hospitals have survived from Victorian times.

Only two more sets are known to exist in the whole of Britain: for Edinburgh and Aberdeen hospitals.

Historians at Kingston University hope to digitise these remaining records in future.

Gertrude Abbott (1846-1934)

Founder of St Margaret's Hospital for Women

Gertrude Abbott began life as Mary Jane O'Brien in Sydney (1846). Her father was a school teacher who moved from New South Wales to Dry Creek, SA and took up farming. "Gertrude" entered Sister Mary McKillop's congregation at Penola, South Australia (1869) and became Sister Ignatius. Influenced by Father Julian Tennison-Woods, she and another young nun claimed to have had visions - there was a scandal when the other nun was found to have faked her visions. Sister Ignatius was blameless but left the congregation (July 1872) two months after she had made her final vows.

She returned to Sydney - but not under her own name, instead she became Gertrude Abbott. She leased a house in the Sydney suburb of Surrey Hills and gathered about her a group of pious women. They lived by dressmaking and adopted the rule of contemplative congregation. Gertrude hoped that the Roman Catholic Church would give the group the status of a religious order.

However, one fateful night, things took a different turn. On that night (1893) a policeman presented a young women at her door. Gertrude had no money or food herself, yet she took the girl in, and one hour later a baby was born. Soon other girls can to her home, and so began what would become St Margaret's Hospital for Women, the third largest obstetric hospital in Sydney.

In the first years of St Margaret's Hospital, Gertrude took in 9 married and 23 unmarried women, and trained 3 nurses in midwifery with the help of her great friend and certified nurse Magdalen Foley (who took a degree in pharmacy so as to dispense medicines). Regarded as a quasi-religious community, the women eventually acquired status within the Catholic Church as their services to the community were recognised. The Hospital was run on donations.

The Hospital began to treat the diseases of women (1904). Soon it had outgrown its present buildings and was forced to move to larger premises in Darlinghurst which Gertrude leased and then bought. Her friend and mentor Father Tennison-Woods died in her care (1889) and left her his entire estate, as did her friend Magdalen Foley (1926). Despite the growth of the hospital she was still quite lonely. Gradually she withdrew as matron and manager.

Gertrude died 48 years after that fateful night, aged 88yo. In the year of her death, the Hospital recorded 760 patients treated, 619 births registered and no maternal deaths. In her will, she passed her Hospital into the hands of the Sisters of St Joseph, whose order she had left unhappily 62 years before.

Medical News: Womb Transplant

From Z News:

Infertile women may soon be able to conceive with scientists bringing womb transplant closer to reality.

After successful animal trials, doctors hope to try the transplant with a human within two years.

“This is a breakthrough, fantastic news for patients who do not have a functioning uterus and want to have children,” the Daily Express quoted Dr Cesar Diaz-Garcia, a key researcher, as saying.

“Until now no one has been able to prove pregnancy is possible after transplantation. We have overcome one of the last steps in achieving this and our aim is to get a human pregnancy using these techniques within two years,” Diaz-Garcia added.

The work has raised the prospect of creating a male pregnancy with a donor uterus and fertility treatment, however Diaz-Garcia insisted: “We are not carrying out work in this area.”

The doctor, an obstetrician who has been collaborating with researchers from the University of Valencia, Spain, predicted that in the future wombs could be harvested from people who are brain dead, living donors or even relatives to minimise the risk of rejection.

The transplanted womb would be connected to the recipient’s blood supply and would stay in place only long enough for a woman to have the children she wanted.

Any baby would have to be delivered by Caesarean section as a transplanted human womb would be unlikely to withstand natural labour.

During the C-section the womb could be removed at the same time, thereby minimising the risk of side effects from longer-term use of anti-rejection drugs.

The breakthrough is to be published in the Scandanavian Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

4000 Years of Choice

From Women's Rights - Change Org:

The imagery that springs to mind when we think about abortion is typically pretty bleak. Coat hangers, screaming protesters, and other symbols of struggle and tragedy have come to be associated with the evolution of reproductive rights.

4000 Years for Choice works to transform this narrative from cautionary and solemn to “personal, positive, and powerful,” with colorful posters celebrating various milestones in the age-old effort to prevent and terminate pregnancies. And for those who mistakenly think that controlling reproduction is strictly a modern issue relevant only in this post-Roe v. Wade era, the 4000 Years for Choice timeline, which begins around 3000 BCE, provides a thoroughly enlightening history of abortion and contraception. Artist and creator Heather Ault says the three goals of the project are to produce broader symbols of choice, illustrate the natural role of reproductive control in all previous societies, and celebrate and reclaim the women’s health clinics around which much of the modern abortion debate is centered.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny

Nurse & Battler Against Polio (1880-1952)

Elizabeth Kenny was born in Warialda, New South Wales, Australia, the daughter of an Irish farmer. She spent her childhood on the Darling Downs. Elizabeth had little education and there is no record of any formal training or of her registration as a nurse.

Elizabeth Kenny was a self appointed nurse (c.1910), working from the family home as Nobby on the Darling Downs, and riding on horseback to give her services without pay to anyone who called. She used hot cloth formentations on the advice of Aeneas McDonnell, a Toowoomba surgeon, to treat symptomatically puzzling new cases (c.1911) diagnosed by him telegraphically as infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis - polio). The patients recovered.

During WW1, using a letter from McDonnell as evidence of her nursing experience, Elizabeth Kenny enlisted and was appointed staff nurse in the Australian Army Nursing Service, serving on troopships bringing home the wounded. She invented and patented a stretcher for the transporting of the wounded. She was promoted to Sister (1917), a title she used for the rest of her life.

Elizabeth Kenny established (1932) a backyard clinic at Townsville to treat long-term polio victims and cerebal palsy patients with hot baths, forments, passive movements, the discarding of braces and calipers and the encouragement of active moments. Doctors and massuers ridiculed her, considering her explanations of the lesions at the site of the paralysis to be bizzare. Thus began a long controversy at the time when there was no vaccination for polio. The strong-willed Kenny, with an obsessional belief in her theory and methods, was opposed by a conservative medical profession whom she mercilessly slated and who considered her recommendation to discard immobilisation to be criminal.

In the USA, however, Eliabeth Kenny's methods became widely accepted and the Sister Kenny Institute was built in Minneapolis. Other clinics were established in her name and Elizabeth Kenny, who remained unmarried, was eulogised in a full-length feature film in the USA. The American Congress (1950) gave her the rare honour of free access to American without entry formalities.

But depsite this success, Elizabeth Kenny remained in bitter controversy, partly because of her intolerance of opposition, and returned to Australia several times with little acclaim. Although Elizabeth Kenny's view of the pathology of polio were generally not accepted it was agreed that she stimulated much fresh thinking on the subject.

Elizabeth Kenny developed Parkinsons Disease (1952), and retired and died in Toowoomba (1952). Her book "My Battle and Victory" was published posthumously (1955).