So Wrong

Excerpts from an article on Medical Mysogony

In the fourth century BC, Aristotle described the female body as the inverse of the male body, with its genitalia “turn’d outside in” – a mutilated male.

Plato, in the fourth century BC, described the womb as a voracious “animal which longs to generate children” that became “vexed and aggrieved” if its sexual impulses to conceive went unheeded.

Elizabeth Comen, in her book All in Her Head, tells the story of 19th-century Boston physician Horatio Storer, who treated a woman who was married to an older man and had a higher libido than her husband. Storer diagnosed the woman with nymphomania and recommended she be committed to an asylum. He also condemned his wife to an asylum for “catamenial mania” (menstruation-induced insanity).

By 1883, French physician Auguste Fabre had declared: “All women are hysterical and ... every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria.”

One of the true villains in the history of medical misogyny was a 19th-century London gynaecologist and obstetrician, Isaac Baker Brown, who forged a career mutilating women in his puritanical crusade to cure hysteria.
Brown pioneered ovariotomy (amputation of the ovaries) and attempted to popularise clitoridectomy (surgical removal of the clitoris glans). Many of his patients died on his operating table.

In the 1840s, Scottish physician James Young Simpson championed anaesthesia during childbirth for the “civilised female”, believing upper-class women were particularly sensitive to pain, Cleghorn writes. There was no need to offer working-class women anaesthesia, given their higher pain tolerance, and black women were almost impervious to pain – a belief that helped justify slave labour.

In the 1840s, German anatomist Georg Kobelt published detailed drawings of the female genitals. By 1948, all mention of the clitoris had been scrubbed from the 25th edition of the seminal Gray’s Anatomy textbook, only to re-emerge in later editions as nothing more than its small, externally visible glans.It wasn’t until 1998 that Dr Helen O’Connell rewrote modern medical books by mapping the entire clitoris, proving it was not just a pea-sized button (glans) but an expansive organ with a wishbone-shaped body and eggplant-shaped bulbs with nerves, blood vessels and connective tissue.

It wasn’t until 1993 that the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated the inclusion of women in clinical trials. In the years prior, health and drug regulators banished from clinical trials any female of childbearing potential (any woman who had not gone through menopause) for fear of harming their fertility.

“Women wait longer for pain medication than men, are more likely to have their physical symptoms ascribed to mental health issues, and are more likely to have their heart disease misdiagnosed, become disabled after stroke, suffer from illnesses ignored or denied by the medical profession, and wait longer to be diagnosed with cancer,” Jackson wrote in Pain and Prejudice.

The saddest part about all this is that men even though they considered women to be less than themselves still desired them,used and abused them, trivialized their maladies and never once considered the absolute beauty in womens souls and the work of art that lay between their legs.....those men were damned fools.

Thanks ladies for giving life to us inanimate males.