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

Helena Wright and The Sex Factor In Marriage

Helena Rosa Wright

From a rather interesting article by Paul Spicer at the Mail Online with the headline of "Desperate wives and the man known as Derek who fathered 500 children with women whose war hero husbands were too shell-shocked to make love" :

These days there are sophisticated and scientific solutions to the dismal problem of childlessness — IVF, Viagra and well-established egg and sperm donor services. We think of these as recent advantages and give thanks for the modern age.

But what only very few people are aware of is that long before sperm donation was practically or ethically possible, in the early 20th century a secret sperm donation service existed for those women most in need.

Helena Wright was a renowned doctor, best-selling author, campaigner and educator who overcame the establishment to pioneer contraceptive medicine in England and throughout the world. Kind, intelligent, funny and attractive, Helena had a way with words and a devoted set of friends. She adored men and spent her life helping women.

She had a great hit in America and Europe with a book called The Sex Factor In Marriage, which financed her innovative medical practice. She opened two London clinics: one for very privileged women in Knightsbridge, one for the poor in Notting Hill.

And it was from these offices that she undertook perhaps her greatest work: to assist hundreds of women whose husbands had returned from World War I unable to father children.

And this from the Spectator with its headline "A secret sperm donor service in post-first world war London":

Between 1914 and 1918 one million Englishmen were killed in France and Belgium. Thousands more were wounded, gassed or shellshocked in the trenches. The appalling losses of the war left many women widowed and led to a shortage of potential husbands, a gender imbalance compounded by the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. They were known as ‘the mateless multitude’.

Among the men lucky enough to return home to wives after the war, many were un-able to perform sexually, whether because of direct injury or shellshock — what we’d call post-traumatic stress disorder. It was a tremendously delicate subject — witness D.H. Lawrence’s decision to make Clifford Chatterley ‘only half a man’, deprived of his virility by war; this aspect of the novel was considered to be the cruel breaking of a taboo.

No wonder, then, that by 1918 Helena Wright had many hundreds of women on her books who had confided to her that they needed help. These women loved their husbands and would never have left them, but they also craved children. What they needed was a sperm donor, before such a thing existed.

More on Helen Wright:

Helena Wright on wikipedia

Helena Rosa Wright on the Margaret Sanger Papers Project

Further Reading:

"Freedom to choose: the life and work of Dr. Helena Wright, pioneer of contraception" by Dr Barbara Evans