History

For centuries, medicine was built around male experience, while women’s health was misunderstood, ignored, or controlled by patriarchal systems. Although women fought for education, legal rights, and social freedom, another battle was happening inside hospitals, laboratories, and delivery rooms. The history of women in medicine is not only a story of scientific progress — it is also a story of survival.

Today, gender medicine is becoming one of the most important medical developments of the modern era. Scientists and doctors are finally recognizing that men and women experience diseases differently, react differently to medications, and even show different symptoms during life-threatening conditions such as heart attacks. However, reaching this point required centuries of suffering, discrimination, and resistance to change.

The Dark History of Women’s Healthcare

Looking back at the history of medicine can be deeply disturbing. Childbirth, one of the most natural parts of human life, was once extremely dangerous for women. In many periods of history, giving birth in a hospital was more deadly than giving birth at home or even outside in poor conditions.

Doctors in the past often had no understanding of infections or hygiene. Many physicians moved directly from dissecting corpses to assisting childbirth without washing their hands. As a result, thousands of women died from infections such as puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever.

Medical practices during childbirth were often cruel and unscientific. Women were frightened, physically restrained, or subjected to painful procedures in attempts to “speed up” labor. After childbirth, most women returned to exhausting physical work within days, while continuous pregnancies weakened their bodies even further.

A major breakthrough came in 1847 when Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis discovered the connection between dirty hands and maternal deaths. He introduced mandatory handwashing with chlorine solutions before doctors treated pregnant women. Mortality rates immediately dropped. However, instead of being celebrated, Semmelweis was mocked and rejected by the medical community. Only decades after his death did the world finally recognize him as the “Savior of Mothers.”

When Women’s Pain Was Dismissed

For centuries, women’s emotional and physical suffering was often labeled as “hysteria,” a condition believed to be caused by the uterus itself. The term came from the Greek word hystera, meaning “uterus.” Women were considered naturally unstable, emotional, and irrational simply because of their biology.

Treatments for “hysteria” were brutal. Some women were isolated, exposed to freezing baths, or subjected to electric shocks. Instead of understanding women’s mental health scientifically, society treated female suffering as weakness or abnormality.

At the same time, women were almost completely excluded from medicine as professionals. Men dominated healthcare systems, research, and decision-making. Female patients had little control over their own bodies, while female doctors were rarely accepted into universities or hospitals.

Even more disturbing were attempts to control female sexuality. Some doctors promoted surgeries on women’s reproductive organs as “treatments” for behaviors considered immoral. These practices reflected not science, but patriarchal ideas about controlling women’s bodies.

The Twentieth Century: Slow but Important Progress

The twentieth century brought major medical changes for women, although progress was often slow and controversial.

One important development was the legalization of abortion in Soviet Russia in 1920. Legal access to abortion significantly reduced deaths caused by unsafe underground procedures. This issue remains controversial today, but medical evidence consistently shows that access to safe reproductive healthcare protects women’s lives.

Later, scientists began studying conditions that had previously been dismissed as “female moodiness.” In 1931, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) was officially described as a medical condition, helping society recognize hormonal health scientifically rather than mock women’s experiences.

Another revolutionary breakthrough came in the 1950s with the development of hormonal birth control. For the first time in history, many women gained greater control over pregnancy and family planning. This transformed women’s education, careers, and independence worldwide.

Medical technology also advanced rapidly. Ultrasound imaging allowed doctors to monitor pregnancies safely, while mammography improved early detection of breast cancer. Pregnancy tests became widely available in the 1970s, giving women more privacy and control over reproductive health.

In 1983, the development of PCR technology transformed medicine by improving the detection of infections, viruses, and genetic diseases. Women benefited greatly from faster and more accurate diagnosis of reproductive and sexually transmitted illnesses.

The Rise of Gender Medicine

One of the most important turning points occurred in 1993, when the United States officially ended the practice of testing medications only on men in clinical trials.

For decades, researchers assumed that results from male patients automatically applied to women. However, women’s bodies function differently in many ways, including hormone balance, fat distribution, metabolism, immune responses, and pain sensitivity.

This led to dangerous consequences. Medications designed for male bodies sometimes caused stronger side effects in women or worked differently altogether. Even today, many medical students are not fully trained to consider sex-based biological differences in treatment.

Gender medicine emerged to solve these problems. This field studies how diseases affect men and women differently and how treatments should be adjusted accordingly.

For example, women often experience heart attacks differently than men. Instead of severe chest pain, women may feel nausea, fatigue, back pain, or stomach discomfort. Because these symptoms are less recognized, women frequently receive slower emergency care and delayed diagnosis.

Research also shows that women are more vulnerable to autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, while men are more likely to die from conditions like COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease.

These differences prove that medicine cannot continue using a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

Conclusion

The history of women in medicine reflects both scientific advancement and gender inequality. For centuries, women’s suffering was ignored, misunderstood, or minimized by systems controlled largely by men. Yet progress continued through the work of brave doctors, scientists, activists, and women who demanded better healthcare.

Today, gender medicine represents a new stage in medical science — one that recognizes biological differences not as weaknesses, but as essential knowledge for saving lives. Medicine is finally beginning to understand that equality in healthcare does not mean treating everyone identically. It means giving every patient the treatment that truly fits their body, experiences, and needs.

The future of medicine depends on continuing this progress. Because when women’s health is properly studied, understood, and respected, society as a whole becomes healthier and stronger.

“A voluminous hem and flawless manners were mere artful shields, designed to conceal an infected fog, the destitution of decaying orphanages and the quiet horror of coming of age in an era of double standards.”


Puffed Sleeves and School Pinafores: Fashion as a Social Cipher
In the provincial British world, clothing was the first and most vital silent manifesto. Fashion rigidly governed every step of a maturing girl, dividing children into 'worthy' and 'outcasts' by the mere quality of their cloth. Whilst wealthy pupils wore pristine, clean dresses of expensive broadcloth, orphans and girls from impoverished families shrouded themselves in shapeless, coarse sacks of sombre hues.

For such a warmth-deprived soul, puffed sleeves, worn by her affluent peers, became the ultimate symbol of girlish happiness and acceptance. It was no mere whim, but a desperate attempt to conceal her inner vulnerability — the loneliness and unwantedness thrust upon her by a cruel society.

When the girls gathered in the classrooms of the local school, their identical white pinafores appeared to be a symbol of innocence. Yet this facade was an illusion. Victorian fashion demanded absolute submission and neatness from young maidens, turning them into porcelain dolls. Beneath those faultless collars and ribbons lay rigid constraints that ruthlessly stifled individuality. Clothing served as a social cipher, forcing a living, trembling heart to hide behind the dead cast of accepted standards.


Constellations of Freckles and a Coppery Gleam: The Curse of Red Hair
Yet there were those whose rejection by society began before they could even put on an orphanage dress.

During the Victorian era, possessors of light-copper, reddish hair and faces covered in constellations of freckles faced a mute, cruel aversion. The proper British world recognised only auburn locks and a noble paleness as the touchstone of girlish purity. In the folk superstitions and even the pseudo-scientific treatises of that time, red hair was frequently linked to depravity, sinful arrogance and an ungovernable, rebellious nature.

Within the walls of strict educational institutions and orphanages, such girls became the target of constant mockery and the malicious whispers of their peers. The nurses and matrons stubbornly denied their delicate, fragile beauty, masking ordinary envy of another's uniqueness behind a feigned religious contempt. It was believed that the very nature of this vivid appearance had to be suppressed through an icy indifference and exhausting punishments, all to drive imaginary pride from the child's soul and compel her to render due obedience.


Church Chairs and Orphanages: The Hidden Side of Childhood Innocence
Victorian society elevated the concept of childhood purity to an absolute, whilst simultaneously stripping it of all mercy. Whilst domestic, beloved children sang in church choirs, learned Latin and carelessly sketched with chalk on slate boards, there existed another, darker side of the empire. It was a world of orphanages and harsh child labour, where outcasts were punished for the slightest manifestation of a vivid imagination, forced for days on end to scrub floors and perform the filthiest tasks.

Secluded asylums turned into sepulchres for living children, into which the community easily cast anyone left without protection.

In this severe reality, childhood was not sacred. Children deprived of parental warmth were perceived by adults merely as free labour and cheap fuel for the system. Victorian upbringing demanded that a child be invisible and soundless. Phrases like 'children should be seen and not heard' closed the door against any display of weakness.

The church choir and righteous slogans served as a shroud for the community's absolute indifference towards broken childhood souls.


Angels in the House and the First Suffragettes: The Dawn of Feminine Rebellion
In this era, a grown woman was legally but a pale shadow of her husband or father, deprived of the right to her own name, property and bodily autonomy. The 'angel in the house' was proclaimed the ideal — a submissive, quiet wife whose sole duty was to please men and raise children.

Yet it was precisely within this suffocating atmosphere of double standards, where women were silenced, that the first seeds of feminism and the suffragette movement took root. The most courageous women, weary of absolute boredom, began to tear away their porcelain masks of submission, demanding equal rights to education, labour and the ballot paper.
It was an era of a great schism.

Whilst conservative society branded the first feminists as 'rebels', 'madwomen' and 'depraved', these women organised secret alliances and took to the streets. They openly declared that intellect does not depend on gender, and that a woman is a complete human being with an independent will from the very moment of her birth.

Their struggle against rigid Victorian laws was an aesthetic and social manifesto, changing the course of history forever and granting a voice to those who had been forced to remain silent for centuries.