Diagnosis Female


Book Description

Being a woman in the health care system is inherently hazardous to your health. Women often experience misdiagnosis and ignorance of their symptoms, in part because for centuries females were excluded from important medical research. This work reveals the gender bias that can cause harm. Tips and tools guide women to better health outcomes.




Medical Bondage


Book Description

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.




Women and Health


Book Description

Women and Health is a comprehensive reference that addresses health issues affecting women of all ages — from adolescence through maturity. It goes far beyond other books on this topic, which concentrate only on reproductive health, and has a truly international perspective. It covers key issues ranging from osteoporosis to breast cancer and other cancers, domestic violence, sexually transmitted diseases, occupational hazards, eating disorders, heart disease and other chronic illnesses, substance abuse, and societal and behavioral influences on health. In this second edition of Women and Health, chapters thoughtfully explore the current state of women's health and health care, including the influences of sex and gender on the occurrence of a wide variety of diseases and conditions. All chapters have been extensively updated and emphasize the epidemiology of the condition — the etiology, occurrence, primary and secondary prevention (screening), risk factors, surveillance, changing trends over time, and critical analysis of the diagnostic and treatment options and controversies. Treatment sections in each chapter have been expanded to create a stronger dialogue between epidemiologists and women's health practitioners. - Saves researchers and clinicians time in quickly accessing the very latest details on a broad range of women's health issues, as opposed to searching through thousands of journal articles - Provides a common language for epidemiologists, public health practitioners, and women's health specialists to discuss the behavioral, cultural, and biological determinants of women's health - Researchers and medical specialists will learn how the gender-specific risks and features of one organ system's diseases affect the health of other organ systems - For example: Hormone replacement therapy used to treat imbalance within the endocrine system is also being used to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease; Drugs developed for type 2 diabetes are now being used in chemoprevention - Orients the non-gerontologist about the importance of considering the entire life cycle of women within research designs and treatment plans - Professors teaching courses in women's health will use slides and additional materials to structure lectures/courses; students will use slides as a unique resource to study for exams




Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women


Book Description

Elizabeth Blackwell, though born in England, was reared in the United States and was the first woman to receive a medical degree here, obtaining it from the Geneva Medical College, Geneva, New York, in 1849. A pioneer in opening the medical profession to women, she founded hospitals and medical schools for women in both the United States and England. She was a lecturer and writer as well as an able physician and organizer. -- H.W. Orr.




Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800


Book Description

Women have engaged in healing from the beginning of history, often within the context of the home. This book studies the role, contributions and challenges faced by women healers in France, Spain, Italy and England, including medical practice among women in the Jewish and Muslim communities, from the later Middle Ages to approximately 1800.




Advancing Women's Health Through Medical Education


Book Description

Neither legalization of abortion nor scientific and political advances in contraception and abortion ensure that training and research in family planning are routinely integrated into medical education. Without integration, subsequent generations of healthcare professionals are not prepared to incorporate evidence-based family planning into their practices, teaching, or research. Omission of this crucial component prevents the cultural and professional normalization of an often stigmatized and embattled aspect of women's health. Taking the successful US-based Ryan and Family Planning Fellowship programs as templates for training, teaching, and academic leadership, this book describes the integration of family planning and pregnancy termination into curricula with an international outlook. With an evidence- and systems-based approach, the book is a unique and practical guide to inspire and train the next generation of healthcare professionals.




Pain and Prejudice


Book Description

“[A] powerful account of the sexism cooked into medical care ... will motivate readers to advocate for themselves.”—Publishers Weekly STARRED Review A groundbreaking and feminist work of investigative reporting: Explains why women experience healthcare differently than men Shares the author’s journey of fighting for an endometriosis diagnosis In Pain and Prejudice, acclaimed investigative reporter Gabrielle Jackson takes readers behind the scenes of doctor’s offices, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs to show that—at nearly every level of healthcare—men’s health claims are treated as default, whereas women’s are often viewed as a-typical, exaggerated, and even completely fabricated. The impacts of this bias? Women are losing time, money, and their lives trying to navigate a healthcare system designed for men. Almost all medical research today is performed on men or male mice, making most treatments tailored to male bodies only. Even conditions that are overwhelmingly more common in women, such as chronic pain, are researched on mostly male bodies. Doctors and researchers who do specialize in women’s healthcare are penalized financially, as procedures performed on men pay higher. Meanwhile, women are reporting feeling ignored and dismissed at their doctor’s offices on a regular basis. Jackson interweaves these and more stunning revelations in the book with her own story of suffering from endometriosis, a condition that affects up to 20% of American women but is poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed. She also includes an up-to-the-minute epilogue on the ways that Covid-19 are impacting women in different and sometimes more long-lasting ways than men. A rich combination of journalism and personal narrative, Pain and Prejudice reveals a dangerously flawed system and offers solutions for a safer, more equitable future.




A Book of Medical Discourses: in Two Parts


Book Description

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.




Diagnosing Empire


Book Description

Examining the emerging figure of the woman doctor and her relationship to empire in Victorian culture, Narin Hassan traces both amateur and professional 'doctoring' by British women travelers in colonial India and the Middle East. Hassan sets the scene by offering examples from Victorian novels that reveal the rise of the woman doctor as a fictional trope. Similarly, medical advice manuals by Victorian doctors aimed at families traveling overseas emphasized how women should maintain and manage healthy bodies in colonial locales. For Lucie Duff Gordon, Isabel Burton, Anna Leonowens, among others, doctoring natives secured them access to their private lives and cultural traditions. Medical texts and travel guides produced by practicing women doctors like Mary Scharlieb illustrate the relationship between medical progress and colonialism. They also helped support women's medical education in Britain and the colonies of India and the Middle East. Colonial subjects themselves produced texts in response to colonial and medical reform, and Hassan shows that a number of "New" Indian women, including Krupabai Satthianadhan, participated actively in the public sphere through their involvement in health reform. In her epilogue, Hassan considers the continuing tradition of women's autobiographical narrative inspired by travel and medical knowledge, showing that in the twentieth- and twenty-first century memoirs of South Asian and Middle Eastern women doctors, the problem of the "Woman Question" as shaped by medical discourses endures.




Unwell Women


Book Description

A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health—from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases—brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative. Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy—and the men who controlled their fate—this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women—and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.