I don’t mean to be unfair to Kay, whose deployment of dark humor seemed to be a coping mechanism to get through the crushing experience of being a junior doctor-90-plus-hour workweeks, disappearing resources, a revolving door of patients with physical and psychological needs far beyond what the cash-strapped NHS can attend to. James Marion Sims, the inventor of the speculum who performed medical experiments on enslaved women, wrote in his unfinished autobiography, “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” Adam Kay, a former National Health Service doctor in obstetrics and gynecology (or “brats and twats,” as his medical-school peers referred to it), wrote in his 2017 best-selling memoir, This Is Going to Hurt, that his least favorite part of the job involved the urogynecology clinic: “a bunch of nans with pelvic floors like quicksand and their uteri stalagtite-ing into their thermals.”
Aristotle, considered by some to be the founder of biology, believed that being born female was an innate sign of deficiency and a “departure” from nature. U p until rather recently, the history of gynecological health was written and recorded by men who seemed to have an inordinate degree of suspicion regarding vaginas.
0 kommentar(er)
