As promised, here is the quote I wanted to post in case it inspired anyone to blog. I'll leave a few comments after to get the ball rolling. And I promise this is my last mention of The Beauty Myth. I'm starting Atlas Shrugged next, so you can look forward to posts about that. :-)


"The relation of doctors to women has been less than straight-forward for most of their history. Healing and tending the sick were primarily female skills until the Enlightenment; women's medical effectiveness was one catalyst for the witch burnings that swept Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. But the ascent of science and the exclusion of women healers from the childbed are connected, and the professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century deliberately barred women from their traditional healing role."

(Wolf later goes on to compare the Victorian age of medicine where women's healthy behaviors like menstration and sexual drive were deemed "sick" to the modern cosmetic surgery practices where failure to compare to an ideal female form are considered "sick." I think this is interesting too, but can't find a quote that is concise enough to include).

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A brief response from me: The book was written 16 years ago, and 16 years is a long time in medicine, so perhaps times have changed. I have never felt "barred" from the opportunity to persue medicine. Though I do feel some things are certainly more difficult (e.g. making friendly small talk, yet sounding intelligent in entrance interviews, asking questions in class and making sure they sound intelligent so as not to be judged more harshly than male classmates).

However, whereas women are continuing to gain a level playing field in medicine, I'm afraid what is currently lagging is the science we are taught. Last week, in a lecture on eating disorders, a class of conditions which prominently affect women (90-95% of those with anorexia nervosa are female - American Psychiatric Association, 1994), only one scientific study was cited to demonstrate what happens to the body when deprived of food. That study was performed on fifty men. And since we don't starve people in the name of science anymore, it looks like this is some of the best information we'll have for awhile. I remember interviewing at Drexel University College of Medicine (a leading institution in women's health studies) and hearing that only recently it had been discovered that symptoms during the onset of a heart attack present differently in men than they do in women.

It certainly makes you wonder how much other information out there is based on research that made the assumption that women's bodies will react the same way men's will to a variable being tested.