This article explores the historical and systemic gender bias in medicine, focusing on the overlooked anatomy of the female body. It highlights the delayed recognition of the clitoris and the impact of viewing the male body as the norm.
Bronwyn Graham is dwarfed by three colossal sketches of a naked male body from hip to heels. She points to a penis as long as her forearm. “Who knows what this is?” she asks to ripples of laughter from the crowd in the Sydney auditorium for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
“As far back as the year 1500, Leonardo Da Vinci was drawing startlingly accurate anatomical sketches of the male penis,” says Graham, the director of the Centre for Sex and Gender Equity in Health and Medicine at The George Institute. “Now, who can tell me what this is?” Graham says, and a giant plush pink clitoris appears on the screen behind her.It would be another 500-odd years before the clitoris was fully mapped by Australian Dr Helen O’Connell in 1998. The urologist made medical history in her downtime. An unfunded, after-hours hustle (more on this later). “How was it that an entire body part was missing from anatomy books right up to the 20th century?” Graham asks. The answer is simple.“It is rather difficult to find the clitoris ... on a male body,” Graham says. “For centuries, scientists have viewed the male body as the status quo as the truest representation of what it is to be human.” Systemic gender bias is as old as medicine itself. The discrimination women experience as a result of their sex (biology) and gender (social norms) has been ingrained in medical research, training and practice that treats male bodies as the ideal and female bodies as aberrations: faulty, defective and deficient. 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. The myths about the way women express and tolerate pain have been ingrained in medicine for centurie
GENDER BIAS MEDICINE ANATOMY CLITORIS HISTORY OF MEDICINE
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