DMay we assume that Elinor Cleghorn only goes to doctors and no longer to doctors? After all, her book is subtitled “How sexism, myths and misdiagnoses influence medicine to this day”. In it she describes how medicine has disadvantaged women since antiquity, that women have been victims of a “male-dominated medical orthodoxy” and that this legacy has prevented effective and rapid diagnosis and treatment of women to this day.
Cleghorn complains about “androcentric medicine” and doctors who, for centuries, have viewed women’s symptoms primarily as physical signs of mental health problems. It brings a wealth of information from the history of medicine and about the everyday life of sick women today. Although she cites a number of sources, the book would have benefited from more academic care. Some of what the author writes is wrong.
The author often loses herself in emotionally charged stories
For example, the Hippocratic Oath is no longer taken “by default” by prospective doctors. In Germany it is no longer part of the degree, in the USA and England a modified version or none is recited. Marie Gillain Boivin was not a gynecologist but a midwife. Mood disorders are not a “diagnostic category of overlapping physical and mental disorders.” Rather, it includes depressive and manic illnesses. It is also incorrect to say that there are no studies on the specific effects on the female body with regard to heart disease, certain types of cancer and AIDS/HIV.
Elinor Cleghorn: “The Sick Woman”. How sexism, myths and misdiagnoses influence medicine to this day.
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Image: Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag
There is a large number of studies that explicitly concern women. And gout isn’t “one of those old-fashioned diseases caused by too much cheese and alcohol.” In most cases, gout is caused by a hereditary weakness in the elimination of uric acid in the kidneys. More rarely, eating habits or a congenital enzyme defect are the cause. A gout attack with an acutely inflamed joint can then be triggered by an excess of alcohol and a meal with too much fish, meat or seafood.
It is impossible to know all the effects of a drug
The author often gets lost in detailed, emotionally charged narratives about the suffering of women and girls. There is the elderly woman with the “wandering uterus” of ancient Greece, the seventeenth-century woman of forty who is said to have bewitched young people, which is said to cause seizures, or the eighteenth-century nanny with panic attacks who was described as having “hysteria with clearly mental cause” were misinterpreted.
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