antiz’s Reviews > Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World > Status Update

Chronic diseases (which mostly affect women) have been misunderstood for so long. With their causes largely unknown and pain felt by women patients not ‘objectively’ measurable or diagnosable, many physicians dismissed symptoms as mental. This led to completely unnecessary, extremely harsh mental health treatments like lobotomies.

~10% of women of ‘reproductive age’ have endometriosis. It takes an average of 8 years to be correctly diagnosed (from the point of reporting symptoms). There is still no cure.

An initial idea on the cause of endometriosis was that it was excessive menstruation due to a woman being childless. Endometrial tissue spreading due to too much menstruation as no pregnancies. The solution is of course to marry and make lots of babies to reduce how many times you menstruate.

Margery Spring Rice observed that women ‘only come into the public conscience’ when performing ‘the public duty’ of motherhood

“Medical discourse still reflected and validated the age-old belief that the healthiest women were the most socially obedient.”

On the testing of women about to get married for syphillis.
“Once again, the preservation of success and the idealised social units of marriage and family lived and dies with women - with the control of their bodies, with the surveillance of their biology.”

Also sex workers were detained and tested for syphilis. Like previous times with other STDs, can be against their will

But it wasn’t just Nazi Germany. That 1933 law was inspired by what had occurred in 1920s America (previously explored), where ableist and racist views pushed for sterilisation of women in mental facilities and of women of ethnic minorities, especially black women.

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who were sentenced to ‘Hitler’s cut’. This included people with chronic diseases and disabilities and any other Nazi-declared deficiency (incl. being not white, being poor, unmarried etc), forcing women to abortions and sterilisation. This continued into the camps, where women were sterilised against their will, eg by injecting formaldehyde into the ovaries, causing intense pain and often death.