The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Treats Women as Patients and Professionals

by Gena Corea

Book by Corea, Gena

Genres: Feminism, Science

Hardcover

First published February 1, 1978

About the author

Genoveffa "Gena" Corea is the author of several feminist nonfiction works analyzing the treatment of women within the medical industry. Her writing has dealt with reproductive technologies, disease and malpractice. She has also published articles in dozens of anthologies including Contemporary Issues in Bioethics (1994), Radical Voices (1989), Embryos, Ethics and Women's Rights (1988), and Test-Tube Women (1984). Corea has published in both English and German, and she has been featured in a number of documentaries on reproductive technology.

Reviews

[Cassandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hidden Malpractice is a scathing indictment of the American medical profession. Scholar and activist Gena Corea passionately writes in response to questionable drug testing, misogynistic language, and the belief that a woman’s health complaints are often psychosomatic. She firmly believes that medicine is political, and she argues in this book that the medical profession has systematically devalued and degraded women’s bodies and minds since the nineteenth century. She examines how men have
dominated American medicine and nursing as well as the effect this domination has had on the average American woman. One recurring theme of this book is that both obvious and subtle discrimination is important and should be studied in depth. Corea’s analysis directly deals with both forms of discrimination by looking at a vast array of topics including medical education, nursing, venereal disease, birth control, abortion, sterilization, childbirth, midwifery, and the doctor-patient relationship.

A third edition would allow for more updates to the existing chapters, as well as the introduction of new material. A chapter dealing with psychiatry would be well-placed because recent studies have shown that women are statistically over-diagnosed with mental illness and over-prescribed psychiatric medication. The rising awareness and commercialization of breast cancer could also be formed into an interesting analysis of women’s healthcare in the public eye. Public response to the recent development of a vaccine for certain strains of the Human Papillomavirus could also be worked into an analysis of adolescent healthcare. In addition to these new topics of inquiry, Corea could expand her arguments using the growing scholarship on the medical abuses enacted on intersex patients. While these secondary sources might not be directly related to Corea’s research, they would allow for a more in-depth discussion of misogyny and the gender binary in medicine. In combination with sources on the medical tribulations of transgendered patients, Corea could craft a thoughtful and well-researched analysis of how medical misogyny hurts any individual that simply does not fit in the rigid gender binary. By showing the similarities between women, transgendered patients, and intersex patients, the text could provide overwhelming evidence that misogyny in the medical field has far-reaching effects on an individual’s identity, social opportunities and overall well-being, in addition to healthcare.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a great book! It covers a wide array of topics, it’s very well researched, and Corea’s clear anger and sense of indignance at the injustices discussed makes it much more interesting, relatable, and pleasant to read than would a book written from a supposedly “clinical and objective” perspective, which purports to only report the facts but which really just does not care whatsoever about the subject and which probably is downplaying the issues. There were a lot of points I marked with small sticky notes as ones good to potentially include as quotations here, especially in the first half of the book, and I had a very hard time narrowing them down. I only wish I had some way to follow up on Corea’s statistics! So many times I was curious whether any of this had changed – and a lot of the time, a Google search doesn’t yield very clear, accurate, or good answers, especially when you know how biased/straight-up DECEPTIVE mainstream medical research reports can be on the topic of women. At one point, Corea was talking about how the substance in the morning after pill is banned for use for like…pigs and horses, or something like that, for causing cancer, except it’s given freely to women in morning after pills, at 40x or so the amount (sorry, I didn’t mark this point in the book, so my memory is kind of terrible!), and it made me super curious whether the current-day morning after pills use the same thing, and whether there is still ongoing research about adverse side-effects/straight up effects (not even side-effects). But back to my general thoughts and feelings: I enjoyed the book. I noticed a lot of similarities in topic/talking points with the other women’s health book I read recently, Seizing Our Bodies, and that gave it a sense of connectivity and communication, which I enjoyed and which I see frequently when I read feminist literature written during similar time periods on similar topics. I did like the other book a bit better, though. In terms of feelings, I felt at alternate times disgusted, annoyed, angered, confused, sad, and horrified – but most of the time entertained! Gene Corea has written several other books which look interesting, one of which is on women and AIDs, and I plan on checking them out.

Quotes:
“Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, the great Renaissance physician who established chemistry’s role in medicine, would have agreed with Michelet [who “credits the Sorceress of the Middle Ages with making true medicine possible”] for he had attended the witch’s pharmacology ‘classes’ in the woods. In 1527, at the University of Basel where he was a professor of medicine, Paracelsus publicly burned his medical books, declaring that everything he knew he had learned from the Sorceresses.” (22)

“A third respondent [to a “1973 survey by Dr. Margaret A. Campbell of women in medical schools”] told this tale: An histology professor demonstrating the digestive system asked for two female assistants. He added HC1 to some food and ended up with its by-product, ‘shit,’ in the beaker. Asking the women to clean up the ‘shit,’ he said, ‘And that’s the place of women in medicine!’ The men laughed.” (36)

“Gynecologists helped keep women ignorant as well as home-bound. They believed anything affecting woman’s brain also affected her sexual organs and vice versa. Therefore, they warned, too much brain activity would cause the uterus to wither and die; likewise, any disturbance in the uterus or ovaries could cause a mental breakdown.” (92)

“[Isaac Baker Brown’s] records show that he diagnosed a case as nervous disease and performed ‘my usual operation,’ [removal of the clitoris “with a pair of scissors”] when presented with almost any symptom: Indigestion, insomnia, fissure of rectum, pain in back or side, sterility, ‘an inability to look one straight in the face,’ painful urination, melancholy, headache, a desire to run away from home or to become a nurse, heart palpitation, anemia, swollen joints, failing eyesight, dry skin and clammy skin.” (94)

“When Margaret Sanger began struggling for birth control, some male doctors did support her . . . But most male support for the birth-control movement rested on a new ‘science’: Eugenics, the improvement of a race through control of breeding. In this science lie some roots of the modern population-control movement. By examining eugenics, we can see that the physician’s motive in advocating certain practices may not be the well-being of his individual patient, as many of us have supposed, but social control.” (126)

“Margaret Sanger, too, became a eugenics advocate. In 1925, on behalf of the Sixth International Birth Control Conference, Sanger urged President Calvin Coolidge to appoint a commission to study the need for sterilization of the unfit. Asked by Yale students in 1934 if there weren’t a danger that the more intelligent classes would practice birth control while the lower classes would not and that society would thus degenerate, Sanger replied that that was exactly what the Birth Control Movement aimed to prevent ‘by more birth control among the illiterate and uneducated classes.’ Moreover, Sanger’s ‘Way to Peace,’ outlined in a 1932 radio talk, called for giving the unfit a choice of segregation or sterilization. Those ‘morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends’ who chose segregation would be put on farm lands and taught to work ‘for the period of their entire lives.’” (130)

“On December 4, 1975, the New England Journal of Medicine published two studies which showed that postmenopausal women who take estrogens are five to fourteen times more likely to get cancer of the endometrium (uterine lining) than women who do not use the estrogens.” (237)

“Hysterectomies are the second most frequently performed operation in the United States. Numerous studies, including one by Dr. Norman F. Miller of the University of Michigan Department of Obstetrics-Gynecology, have concluded that at least one third of them are completely unwarranted. Women are thus unnecessarily exposed to the risk of anesthesia reactions and postoperative complications like pneumonia, blood clots and infection.” (238)

“A Health Research Group report points out that while hysterectomy does eliminate the possibility of cancer of the uterus, the death rate from uterine cancer is less than the mortality rate from hysterectomy.” (239, in the footnote)

[Rachel]

Read in 1996; my review from then: Good historical perspective on these issues; I'd like to see it brought up to date.