Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Medicine & Misogyny

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Using leeches to suck the blood from patients, mercury pills, and removing limbs with NO anaesthetic - healthcare throughout history hasn’t been the most…appealing.But have you ever thought about the difference in how men and women were treated?From witch trials to hysteria to wandering wombs, today Betwixt the Sheets Kate speaks to Dr Elinor Cleghorn, author of 'Unwell Women' to find out about gender bias in medicine.*WARNING this episode includes fruity language and themes of an adult nature*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Seyi Adaobi.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound and an archive clip from Body-care and Grooming public video 1948, and Good Grooming for Girls, 1946 (GlamourDaze). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. As per usual, this episode will contain adult themes, sexual nature and descriptions of surgical treatments, which some people may find disturbing. And if that's you, you may want to duck out right now. Otherwise, let's get into it. Taking a look at it from the doctor's point of view.

Proper care requires a basic understanding of what it is and what it does. Now, there are a lot of little bad habits that many girls have, that detract from poison charm. Using leeches to suck the blood from patients, mercury pills and removing limbs with no anesthetic, healthcare throughout history hasn't been the most appealing. But have you ever thought about the differences in how men and women were treated throughout history? Today we're looking into myth, medicine and misdiagnosis throughout the ages.

From ancient Greece to the witch trials across Europe, to the beginnings of so-called hysteria, right up to the present day. So let's go Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs

by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hi there, I'm Kate Lister, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. the history of sex scandal in society. If you want to feel pissed off about how women's bodies and minds have been misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed for centuries,

then you have definitely come to the right place today. Today, we are looking into the gender bias in healthcare throughout the ages, and we're covering a lot of ground. From ancient Greece and the wandering womb theory, which is as bizarre as it sounds, by the way, to how going through the menopause could get you accused of being a witch, to the unethical history of gynecology. I'm joined by historian and author Dr. Eleanor Cleggon, whose own personal health journey

led her to investigate the origins of gendered medical bias, and ultimately write her book, Unwell Women, A Journey Through Medicine Myth in a Manmade World, which is well worth a read, by the way. Let's get started. Oh, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. Eleanor Cleggone, thank you for joining me Betwixt the Sheets. Thank you so much for having me, Kate. It's such a joy to be here. There's no one I'd rather have to talk about this particular subject. The History of Unwell Women.

And you have a lot of material to work with in this book, don't you? Your book was one of those ones where I kept putting it down, and then I was just pissed off. And I'd have, like, nowhere to put my rage. I'd just be, like, walking around Tesco's glaring at men, just like, you bastards, that kind of. But, yeah, I don't want to induce rage in everybody, but could you tell us a little bit about what?

unwell women is about and what led you to write it? It is a rage-inducing and infuriating history, this history of unwell women, and I definitely felt that rage infuri while I was researching and writing this book. But I think that that rage and fury is justified, and I think that once we can express it, we can go some way to dismantling

some of these historical injustices around our bodies, minds, and especially around the way that medicine, as a system of power, has really sought to constrain and control, especially women's bodies and minds, across its very long history. So unwell women is a history of the ways in which medicine has pathologised, misunderstood, misinterpreted, and sought to control women's bodies and minds since the time of ancient Greece, when our modern, medical model really began, and it journeys through the centuries of medicine's history up to the present, where I tell my own story of being misdiagnosed on my search to figuring out what was happening in my own body, which culminated in a diagnosis of an autoimmune disease called Lupus in 2010. So I appear at the end of the book as a sort of case study, much like many of the other case studies of unwell women that I unearthed and used in order to tell this

infuriating story. So this is personal as much as political for you? Very much. It was really a book that began sort of germinated after my diagnosis and after my coming to the realization that the seven plus years of being told by doctors that my pain my migraines, my digestive issues, my weird swelling in my legs, was either all in my mind or my, in quotes, hormones, or my lifestyle, you know, probably drinking too much, probably overweight. And the realization that this was not actually my fault, but rather a consequence of a gender bias that's very baked into medicine. and very baked into the way that some doctors respond to women,

especially when women present with symptoms that are not immediately diagnosed or understandable. So at first, when I was going through this in my 20s, this sort of medical journey towards trying to figure out, trying to get an answer about why I was feeling so rough all the time, I did internalise a lot of what these doctors were saying to me and ended up thinking that I must just be an irrational, overly emotional, exaggerating, intention-seeking, woman. So finding out about why this might have happened to me came through mining history. The realization came by looking back and realizing

that across medical time, women have been told that their pain, that their symptoms, that their ill health, their mental health, their physical health is somehow the fault of their gender, somehow the fault of something defective and deranged that is just embedded in the female body and mind. And you go right back, don't you? I mean, you go back to, we start with the ancient Greeks and we could give weeks to this particular subject. But what was it that the Greeks were doing in particular that stood out for you as that sort of a starting point for this? What was going on? I wanted to begin with ancient Greece because this is always cited as the period in our history where modern medical practice really began. It was the beginnings of what we now know

to be this system of symptom presentation, a doctor reads the symptoms, makes a diagnosis, assigns treatments, assumes a cause. So this model was set in motion by a set of authors, the Hippocratic authors. And we know Hippocrates as a figure who developed the oath that our medical professionals still swear to date, the first do no harm oath. And of course, the Hippocratics also have very, very specific ideas about the kinds of illnesses and diseases that affect women and men differently. So it's the first time really, I think, in human history in which unwell women emerge. into discourse, into historical record. And I was very interested about how unwell women were featured in this foundational historical material

because material like the Hippocratic treatisees became the foundation of so much medical thinking for centuries. And echoes and shades of that medical thinking are very much still with us today. Really? And the ancient Greeks were writing about bodies, based on what they understood about society. They weren't dissecting bodies, they weren't performing autopsies and examining organs. So so much of what they decreed about human bodies

was based not only in what they heard from patients or could see in their symptoms, but also what they believed bodies were for. And ancient Greece being a deeply patriarchal society saw the female body as a reproductive, entity as a vessel for bringing new life, as a vessel for creating generations of civilised Greeks. And what happened in that determination was that, of course, women's personhood, their subjectivity is completely missing. But what we get is this very forensic focus on diseases and disorders

of the primary female organ, the uterus or womb. Tell me about the wandering womb, the womb that goes for a wonder. Was that Hippocrates? It was. I mean, it was a few of them. It was a few of those ancient Greek dudes. But Hippocrates did draw upon this theory that because what a woman's womb wanted more than anything was to be furnished with male seed, I'm sorry, or weighed down with a fetus or an embryo. Oh, absolutely.

wasn't sort of moistened in that way, that it would start hungering and go roaming around a woman's body in search of the requisite moisture to make it healthy. So so many illnesses and diseases of a woman's body were attributed to the belief that her womb had an almost independent impulse for sexual intercourse for conception for procreation. Almost independent. of the woman whom the organ resided in. And so, yeah, they did believe that the womb could, you know, clamber upwards towards the heart and the liver and the diaphragm. And in its movements, produce a really dazzling array of symptoms

from fainting to feelings of choking in the throat, to pain, to fever, and to many different issues connected specifically with reproductive, menstrual, and maternal health. This is where we get the word hysteria from, is that right? We get the beginnings, we get the emergence of hysteria here, purely because one of the ancient Greek words for uterus was hysteria. So the word hysteria is rooted very much in this idea of an independent, but not even that mischievous, hungering, insatiable womb

that wanted what it wanted. And conveniently, what it wanted was to perform the duties, ordained to women under patriarchy. I kind of like the idea of having a mischievous womb that's up to no good. I think it might be right for a reclamation. Like, my womb is mischievous. It's not actually doing what you want it to do. Was there any male equivalent?

Did anyone come up with the idea about wandering testicles or anything? I think I've dated a few of those. But was there any kind of equivalent? in the male body? Or is it just this? So it's not really that the womb was kind of off on its jollies. It was more that it was this unpredictable thing inside the female body that could make you go crazy,

make you do bad things. But was there a male equivalent? I don't think there was a male equivalent of the wandering womb as such. I mean, I've definitely not read about wandering testicles. No. Although, you know, you read some of these recipes in the ancient Greek writings for things like infertility and I think there's a few times when goats testicles are recommended as a necklace for men to wear if they're a bit impotent. But that might be a different thing.

Wandering goats testes. Anyway, you do get a sort of equivalent of male hysteria in about the 17th century, but it was always ascribed to men who did in heavy quotes, girly things, like studying and reading a lot and clerical pursuits because they were really embodying in their physical and mental habits the state of a woman, a feminized state, a more sedentary, more thoughtful state, rather than doing what they were supposed to do, which was run around a lot, you know, use up all that testicular energy, just hunting or whatever. Yeah. Feminine, bad, masculine good. Yeah. So it did have equivalence. And then, of course, we see equivalence of female hysteria a little bit later on in the burgeoning ideas around sort of post-traumatic stress

after war. So we get this sense of a sort of male hysteria that comes from shell shock, from the beginnings of thoughts about shell shock in the 19th century. But in terms of hysteria being linked to a fallible, deranged body part, it's very much, I think, rooted in women. The idea that all women are born with this thing inside them. Yeah. That for their own good, wants to be impregnated, once marital sex needs to conceive, needs to bear children. It's definitely a man wrote that one,

definitely came up with that one. And what I liked by your book, I'm going to jump from Hippocrates right up to the early modern period, is that you bring out links between a medicalised body, reproductive system and the witch trials. I thought that was fascinating because this crazy idea of the wandering womb that just was off on its travels,

it crops up. Of fact, it still with us in a lot of ways. The idea that women are more emotional and hysterical and time of the month love, all of that stuff, that's linked to it. But tell me how you made those links in the witch trials because I thought that was fascinating. So even though by the early modern period,

we've got enough information about what's really going on beneath women's skin to understand that the womb is tethered by sinews and ligaments, it can't actually wander. This fantasy that a woman's body, a woman's biology was essentially irrational, that above anything else at hunger for intercourse, that came from ideas like the wandering womb, still haunted, especially medical,

but also social and cultural perceptions of female bodies. So even though ideas like the wandering womb or its long shadow didn't directly cause, the persecution of often women for presumed acts of witchcraft in the early modern period, it certainly contributed to this culture of intense suspicion around what women were capable of of because of what their bodies could make them capable of. So there was this book that we can really laugh about and pillory now because it's so crazy, but it's called The Secrets of Women. And it was actually authored around the 13th or 14th century.

and it was written by a chap styling himself as Albertus Magnus or St. Albert the Great. So he was pretending to be him as writing in the style of. So this pseudo-Albertus chap wrote a book where he was purporting to reveal all the secrets of women, as in how babies are made. And this book was for audiences of celibate men who of course vowed never to make contact with a woman's body. let alone have anything to do with one. Right. So Albertus was explaining the facts of human generation and reproduction,

but to a very particular audience who already brought into this idea that women were fundamentally wicked, that women's irrationality, their association with the mess and mock of biology and sex and need, could make them commit these sort of heinous acts. And he names all sorts of particular dangers around female bodies, particularly the dangers of menstrual blood. And he talks about menstrual blood having such power over a woman

that it could lead her to perform awful, deceitful, violent acts, including intentionally maiming the male penis by inserting bits of iron into her vagina, then luring him to have sex with her. Who amongst us has not? whom amongst us indeed has not shout out to us all at certain points in our dating lives till ever I read stuff like this I'm always taken back by not so much that the document exists not so much that somebody came up with this nonsense but that other people believed it that blows my mind

I mean it fed very this sort of propaganda because that's what it is pseudo medical propaganda absolutely fed in to the fancy of Christian myths around women's bodies being this vessel for sin, women being responsible for unleashing sin in the world because they could not control what their bodies wanted. You know, they were not capable of exerting the rational control needed to stop shagging everywhere and ruining, you know, human life. So it played into this. So it worked in terms of the prevailing narrative about women's wickedness. And of course, only the most pious, women were believed to be able to execute that much control over their bodies. So when we get to

something like the persecution of women for acts of presume witchcraft, mostly between the 15th and 17th centuries and across Europe, this sort of material supported the idea that women could theoretically lie with the devil in the form of a dog, goat, bat, you name it, because this is what they hunger for and they couldn't sort of help themselves. They can't control themselves. Exactly. They can't exert that control. And this really feeds in also to the sense of women's bodies always being unwell because they don't have that power, that mental power, that physical strength to get control of what's going on beneath the skin or in the mind. You're listening to the Twixter Sheets. I'll be back with Eleanor after this short break.

History tells us that in 1455, the royal houses of Lancaster and York went to war, beginning a 30-year dynastic struggle for the throne that would change the course of English history forever. It became known as the Wars of the Roses. At this time, the Wars of the Roses are well underway. There's so much uncertainty throughout the country and who's going to come through all of this. This month, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out all the answers to your burning questions. People have just ashamed that both ofuds were bad.

For when was this scribbled in? It's effectively an act of graffiti on a parliamentary role. Who were the key players? What were the critical battles and switches of allegiance? Was it ever really a case of good and bad? Join me, Matt Lewis, on the Gone Medieval podcast from History Hit every Saturday for brand new episodes. Tell me about some of the witch trials that stood out for you in particular. Tell me about the case of Elizabeth Jackson and the witch trial there.

Yeah, so Elizabeth Jackson was an older woman who was accused of bewitching a young girl called Mary Glover. And she was accused of bewitching her because she was older, crotchety, and also because of some presumed slight over insulting somebody's clothing. Now, by this point, of course, a lot of the trials, witch trials in particular, have been assigned to local courts rather than to major criminal crown courts. So this is when we see this real shift from witchcraft being these, you know, presumed sort of heretic crimes to witchcraft being blamed as the reason for common disputes in villages and towns. So it's not surprising then the older single women were blamed if they had a certain temperament, if they spoke for themselves, for having something

to do with stealing a neighbour's cow or bringing a pail of water up from a well. So we see this kind of local neighbourhood watch type disputes where witchcraft performed apparently by an old woman is the reason. And so Elizabeth Jackson was accused of this. And what is so interesting about this particular case is that, as was often the case in witchcraft trials, a doctor, a physician, was brought in to defend Elizabeth Jackson against the accusations of witchcraft made by this young girl, Mary Glover. And the physician named Edward Jordan was brought in to defend Elizabeth Jackson and to give his opinion as a noted and respected, physician on what was actually going on here? Was Mary Glover, the young girl who apparently fell into dead and senseless fits really under some kind of demonic possession caused by a curse put on her by the older Elizabeth Jackson? Or was something else going on here? And Jordan decided that what

was happening is that Mary Glover, the young girl, was not in fact bewitched at all, but that she was suffering from a form of hysteria, a form of hysteric suffocation because her womb, in want of action, in want of conception, marital sex, was causing the kind of symptoms that made her appear as if she were possessed. And from this case, Jordan wrote a short discourse on a disease called hysterical suffocation or as he called it then suffocation of the mother, mother being an early modern word for womb. And it formed what is now thought to be the first work in English that describes the disease hysteria in the sense that we understand it today. So it's fascinating to me that hysteria as a diagnosis emerges into medical thinking

as a plausible explanation for the symptoms of witchcraft. Like when you say it like that, it's mad, isn't it? She's not actually possessed by the witchcraft of this old woman over here, is that her womb is suffocating from not enough semen. And that's a perfectly rational diagnosis. And everybody went, yes, that makes sense. And in the medical culture of the time, this was, of course, his attempt to make a humane assessment of what was happening.

And to... So he thought he was doing her a favour. Yeah, he thought he was doing both of them a favour. He thought he was sparing Elizabeth Jackson, you know, the noose or the fire, and also helping Mary Glover to become healed because he was putting forward an assessment of what was really happening in her body.

But it's just if we think about it, two different forms of possession, isn't it? You're either possessed by a witch or possessed by your womb. Those are our two options. It's funny when you say it, but when you actually think that this was actually the medical understanding that underpinned and in some way still continues to underpin medical conceptions of women and women's bodies, that is quite terrifying, isn't it, really? It is really terrifying. And the fact that this particular case happened right at the beginning of the 17th century, so end of the 16th, early 17th century, and that it's still with us in some form today. there are still these echoes of this kind of thinking that ultimately we have no rational control over our bodies and the illness is somehow baked into that irrationality that we are just born with by nature of our agenda.

Is this the kind of the beginning of gynecology? I mean maybe gynecology has been around in some form since Hippocrates and his mates, but like the actual field of gynecology is a medical discipline. like somebody would say, I am a gynecologist. Like, when did that start to emerge? So you're totally right. Gynecology has been with us since ancient Greece. I mean, the Hippocratic diseases of women treaties were all gynecological treaties.

They all focused on disorders of the uterus, disorders of the reproductive system in women. And, you know, men, surgeons, midwives, or to some extent of practice gynaecology. but in terms of a professional gentleman's discipline, gynecology really gained this status in the sort of early 19th century with a turn towards this fascination or a re-emergence of a real clinical fascination in this field

called the diseases of women, women's diseases, which generally encompassed all aspects of sort of reproductive health from menstrual health to generation to birth itself. So this was really around the time that gentlemen physicians became very interested in gynaecology's professional discipline. And to be tempting to think that kind of it was around this point that you got more, I suppose you did get more surgical awareness and more anatomy awareness, like things that could genuinely help.

But it was still linked very much to this idea that women can go mad at any moment. I mean, you've got clowns like Dr. Isaac Baker Brown knocking around if you'd like to explain a little bit about who that particular gentleman was. Absolutely. So Isaac Baker Brown is a real villain of the piece and he was a gynecologist and obstetrician and he worked in London from about the mid-19th century and it's fair to say that Isaac Baker Brown was the worst type of medical misogynist and is often called out as one of the major villains, one of the major medical misogynists in our history. And, Baker Brown began his career performing various surgeries. He was a surgeon obstetrician, so I was very

interested in surgical solutions for women's diseases. And he performed very controversially or tried to popularise the surgery ovariotomy, so the removal of women's ovaries. And one of the operations was performed on his own sister. Now ovariotomy at this time was very, very risky. It carried a huge mortality and morbidity rate. And many of the other upstanding physicians in London didn't believe it should be done with this frequency only in really drastic cases. But Baker Brown was exceptionally scalpel happy. And this is how he wanted to further his career.

He was a very bluffed up, vane glorious chap who wanted to be, you know, a celebrity guine, really. Because many of the gynecological community were very against Baker Brown. sort of hunger to perform surgeries. He set up his own surgical home in what is now Notting Hill about the mid-19th century, where he purported to be able to treat cases of hysteric disease under which he included epilepsy by performing an absolutely sickening surgery called the clitoridectomy. A Baker Brown believed that the root of so many nervous, hysteric diseases in women

convulsive diseases, diseases of the reproductive organs, especially menstrual diseases, would link to the sort of irritation of the female organs. And he believed that women could bring this on themselves by masturbating. Now, he was a Puritan, who obviously did not believe that women had any right to sexual pleasure, certainly not if that pleasure was performed by themselves. So the case for clitoridectomy was frighteningly broad. And he also attached the need for clitoridectomy to a very moral cause. He believed that if women masturbated, if they irritated their clitorises,

they would completely lose interest in getting married to men, hollow love, that they would not want to proceed with a domestic life and that they would become ruined. and the only choice would that they would have to become sex workers and resort to prostitution because no one would want to marry them. So he set about, he really enmeshed a moral panic, a moral fear with an apparent medical need. And some of the case studies in his book, I think written in the 1860s,

are just horrifying. He describes patients often young women who have, what we now would appreciate to be the symptom, of perhaps endometriosis or perhaps multiple sclerosis or perhaps just, you know, acute anxiety at their social limitations. And he is advocating for the brutal removal of the glands of the clitoris in order that they turn away from the practice of irritating their bodies and gain this kind of physical, mental and moral health.

Thankfully, Baker Brown was struck off. as a doctor, his practices were generally abhorred. But clitoridectomy was in some cases also performed by other gynecologists and surgeon obstetricians who also prescribed to the belief that irritating the clitoris, especially if it was deemed to be too large, was the cause of nervous, mental and physical disorders, or at least that those disorders could be somehow allayed if the possibility for pleasure in oneself was removed from a woman. Wow. Please go and irritate your clitorises with careless abandoned listeners.

It just makes me so cross that these people were doing. And it's not even that long ago, really, in terms of history. So he can get in the bin, definitely. Talk to me about the father of gynecology, the guy that's often referred to as the father of gynecology because he wasn't cutting out clitorises to try and make you happy to stay at home. on baking cakes, but he wasn't a million miles away, was he? So James Marion Sims was a gynecologist who was based in Montgomery,

which was a town in Alabama and the United States. And he was a practicing physician in a town in which two-thirds of the population were enslaved. So two-thirds, the population of a whole town, were under chattel slavery. And James Marion Sims was a physician who, heavily inverted commas cared for enslaved people working on the plantations. And he would often be called to attend to young enslaved women who had suffered injuries after birth. He was brought by one of the plantation owners to visit a young enslaved woman named Anarka who'd suffered a terrible post-birth injury called a vesicofaginal fistula, which she had suffered.

at the time was mostly deemed incurable. And it's a harrowing injury because it can be caused by birth trauma but also by rape. So we don't know many of the details about what Anarka had actually been through, sadly, but we do know. Sims was brought in to attend to Anarka and he eventually agreed to try to repair the fistula that she had suffered, we assume as a result of a traumatic birth. Now, this fistula was largely seen as incurable at that time. And Sims purported before that to have absolutely no interest in rolling up his sleeves and looking at the female vagina or the uterus. In fact, he claimed to be disgusted by it.

Oh, that's nice for a doctor. Isn't that lovely? It's really nice of him. So he thought after having a think about it that he would try, at least, to innovate a surgical solution for the fistula. And he performed experimental surgeries on Anarka and I think about 11 other enslaved young women in his backyard surgical hospital that he claimed was the first women's hospital in the United States. These experimental surgeries were always performed without anaesthetic

and with absolutely no regard to the feelings, personhood or humanity of the women that he was experimenting on. He did perfect, in his words, a surgical solution for repairing the vaginal fistula, one that earned him the moniker, the father of American gynecology. There was a statue of him until quite recently, wasn't there? A statue of Sims stood at the Harlem end of New York Central Park until 2018, and the community and residents at this particular part of New York had been protesting for years to have his statue removed

and to have instead a memorial to Anarka, Betsy, Lucy and the other unnamed women that Sims experimented on during this time. Do we know if they survived? What he was doing, is there records of them afterwards? There was a posthumously published autobiography of Sims' writings and recollections of this period that was not published until after he died. and it is one of the most harrowing things I've ever read.

He describes the procedures in the way that a doctor would describe a surgical procedure, so in excruciating detail. Occasionally we hear that one of the women screamed and screamed or that she was on her knees, but their subjectivity, their experiences, completely scrubbed away. It's not even something that he deigned to really think about, because in his eyes, these women were not women. They were objects to be experimented on.

To him, they were medical specimens. They were property that he had purchased. So they still remain slaves in his eyes and completely devoid in his opinion of feeling. And it remains to me one of the most harrowing things I've ever read principally because Sims is putting forward this material as essential. You know, he believes he's doing this incredibly important duty to saving women's lives. But yet he is not in any way acknowledging the incredibly violent, incredibly traumatic origins of how he produced that knowledge.

And that is a very kind of neat summation of the entire history, really, of women in medicine, is people thinking that they're doing a really good thing. helping people out, but absolutely no connection or acknowledgement to the actual real person who's being impacted by this. It's so dark this stuff, Eleanor. And I admire you so much for the research and the work that you're doing. And I've got to wrap this up. But the way I'd like to leave it is, what would you like to see in women's medicine going forward? Because it's nice to to think that we're a world away from witchcraft trials and Dr. Isaac Baker Brown and Sims, but in many ways we're not. So what would you like to see going forward? I think that although so much of this material is harrowing and so much of the history that I talk about in unwell women is infuriating

and rage-inducing, I think that by facing up to this history, we can begin to learn what not to repeat in the future. So I think the most important thing that I'd like to see going forward is that women, marginalised people, people of all genders. are respected in their full personhood and subjectivity when it comes to their illnesses, their diseases, their health conditions, and also the needs of their bodies. Throughout history, we've seen this real demonisation of any kind of bodily pleasure and enjoyment

that doesn't subscribe to the heterosexual norm. And, you know, we've always seen women's sexual pleasure, women's sexual health, be vilified and relegated to this kind of unspeakable place where it's not considered important, it's not considered, you know, a medical issue to treat respectfully with research and thought. So what I've really like to see is a more respectful, more inclusive, more person-centered view of what health is and that mental health, sexual health, physical health. We need to begin with the people that it affects

rather than imposing, often antiquated, often racist, often sexist mythologies, which have no place in an equitable health future. And I think by facing up to this histories and how embedded they still are in how we think medically about people today, if we can untangle that antiquated stuff, then we can begin to move forward to a place

where people are respected as human beings when negotiating this incredibly important part of their lives, which is their bodily, physical, mental and sexual health. Dr. Elizabeth Cleggone, thank you so much for joining me, betwixt the sheets. Thank you so much, Kate, for having me. It's been such a pleasure. So that's it for today. Thank you so much for joining me. And thank you to Dr. Eleanor Clegghorn for sharing your knowledge in your time today. Please make sure to like and subscribe wherever it is you get your podcasts. We've got episodes on the history of BDSM, vasectomies and corsetry all coming up.

And if you've enjoyed what you've heard today, please leave us a review. If you didn't enjoy what you've heard, then don't worry about that for now. That's fine. This podcast was produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie G. And includes music from Epidemic Sound. Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.