Until a few weeks ago, Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome was dismissed as merely ovarian cysts, which must have been a real comfort to patients living with the actual systemic endocrine condition. Meanwhile, people with endometriosis continue their global scavenger hunt for appropriate care, as documented by the Australia Institute.
This isn't just a handful of bad doctors with poor bedside manners, argues historian Alison Downham Moore. It's a centuries-long pattern where medicine has treated women's testimony as unreliable, their pain as less urgent, and their reproductive organs as fair game for unwarranted surgical exploration. The core injustice, she says, is about whose knowledge counts - and women's knowledge of their own bodies apparently doesn't make the cut.
The roots dig deep into Western medicine's past. In the 1700s, women were thought to be ruled by "the vapours" - which sounds like a Victorian perfume but was actually a diagnosis. By the 1800s, they were the "sicker sex," their entire aging process reduced to menopause, making them prime targets for experimental treatments and commercial exploitation. The logic has proven remarkably durable: women's health is profit fodder, while their symptoms are blamed on hormones, nerves, or emotions.
Gynaecology offers a particularly stark case study. The first survivable hysterectomies using antiseptic measures in the 19th century were performed on women with benign fibroid tumours who often weren't told what surgery they were getting or that their tumours weren't cancer. More than half died. By the late 20th century, more than a third of women in the West had hysterectomies by old age. In the 1970s, US surgeons proposed hysterectomy as contraception for lower-class women they deemed unable to manage birth control - a rationale that also fueled sterilisation of First Nations and Black women in multiple countries.
Hysterectomy has served, depending on context, as therapy, cancer prevention, gender transition surgery, covert Catholic birth control, population management, and administrative convenience. When women today report being steered toward hysterectomy for benign uterine tumours without full information about alternatives, it's not an anomaly - it's a pattern. Clinical authority still too readily replaces genuine consent, and long-term consequences for aging and wellbeing get downplayed.
None of this is to say nothing has improved. Surgery is safer, many clinicians are deeply reflective, and consent standards are better. But as Moore notes, progress in technique doesn't automatically produce justice in care. If medicine wants to confront medical misogyny, it needs to reckon with the histories that made women unreliable witnesses of their own bodies - and maybe start believing them.