I recently read (or, I’m in the process of reading) the book Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery. It’s about the experience of women in the context of medicine and science – as patients and subjects, as well as providers – throughout history and now. I think it’s really relevant to my research and this program, since its focus is women and science.
Although I haven’t finished the book, the chapter that I did read was really interesting. It talks about the MRFIT study, which looked at heart disease and the myriad factors that impact it, on a huge scale, which produced data and results that would be referenced for years to come. However, it was done with men exclusively, and it was later found that many of the results were not applicable to women, including the classic signs of cardiac arrest, among other things. Other studies that make up a lot of the original sources of thinking on subjects either never included women, or added them later, which means no matter how many new studies include women, we are still playing catch up as far as research on women’s health is concerned. Fairly recently, the FDA began requiring women be included in clinical trials and other research studies, however, results are not broken down by sex/gender even if they are included. Furthermore, such rules only concern human subject studies, meaning that many studies using animals or cell lines use only males, and many don’t even specify the sex of the cell lines.
Personally, I find this particularly relevant to my research, as I am looking at the effects of bariatric surgery on female bodies, as well as on their offspring. Much of the previous literature looking at bariatric surgery, particularly the specific kind my lab studies, used primarily male animals, not considering effects on females, much less pregnancy. It’s exciting to be working on research that hasn’t really been done before and focusing on women’s health issues specifically, especially when looking at the context of the history of women in health research.
I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book, particularly as it gets to the role of women as healers and healthcare providers, especially in the role of midwives, as I am vehemently interested in pregnancy and childbirth. I have read past works that focus on the history of childbirth both in the U.S. and around the world, so I’m always excited to find out new information on the subject. I may update this post as I read more of this book.