Written by Emily Young
Sexism in contemporary healthcare is often framed as a modern problem, stemming from a lack of training or insufficient research attention to women’s health. While these explanations are not wrong, they are incomplete. From a critical health psychology perspective, the marginalisation of women’s bodies is not an accident of modern medicine, but a feature of its foundations. The patriarchal logic that shapes how women’s bodies are understood, viewed, and governed today are embedded in the historical origins of Western medicine.
From mythology through philosophy and theology, the female body has long been constructed as unstable and dangerous. In Greek mythology, Pandora (the first woman) is created not as a gift, but as a punishment for Prometheus’s actions; a beautiful vessel who unleashes suffering upon the world, and whose descendants would continue this ‘beautiful evil’. Feminist interpretations of Pandora’s mythology have noted the symbolic nature of the pithos (later mistranslated as ‘box’), as womb-like, a container from which chaos emerges (Boulding, 2015). Pandora’s body is simultaneously alluring and destructive, establishing an early cultural foundation in which femininity itself becomes a site of risk and deceit.
These ideas were reinforced through early medical philosophy. Hippocratic gynaecology described the uterus as a ‘sentient’ organ, capable of moving around the body and causing illness, madness, or suffocation if not properly anchored through sex or childbirth (King, 2022). Aristotle later described women as ‘mutilated males’, biologically incomplete and ruled by emotion rather than reason (Merleau, 2003). These were not obscure ideas; they formed the foundations of Western medicine. These ideas were later absorbed into Christian theology, where women’s bodily suffering was moralised as punishment for Eve’s disobedience (Gottlieb, 2020). Across mythology, philosophy, and theology, is a consistent message: the female body is unreliable, irrational and in need of external control.
These assumptions did not disappear with the rise of modern medicine, rather they were repackaged. The diagnosis of hysteria, derived from ‘hystera,’ meaning uterus, functioned for centuries as a way of pathologizing women’s pain, distress, and resistance (Devereux, 2014). Emotions became medicalised, embodied knowledge became untrustworthy, and, female resistance became psychiatric weakness. For example, the pathologisation of the suffragette movement as hysterical, and the resultant force feeding of political prisoners (Miller, 2009). Although hysteria no longer appears in diagnostic manuals, the logic persists within reproductive healthcare, where women’s accounts of pain and distress are still frequently minimised or dismissed.
Recent feminist research has demonstrated how these historical narratives continue to shape modern experiences (Young & Kirk, 2025). Analyses of online discussions about heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB), for example, show that women routinely describe being disbelieved, normalised, or treated as unreliable narrators of their own bodies. What is concerning is not only the prevalence of dismissal, but being disbelieved is described as expected, not shocking.
Yet to be published, a critical discourse analyses of these accounts highlight two recurring patterns (Young & Kirk [in prep]). The first is reproductive control, where fertility is prioritised over wellbeing. Women describe being denied treatment, particularly surgical options, on the basis of hypothetical future motherhood, even when their quality of life is severely compromised. The second pattern is epistemic injustice, where women’s reports of pain and disruption are reframed as exaggeration, emotionality, or irrationality. In these encounters, biomedical authority consistently outweighs lived experience.
Importantly, medical dismissal does not begin or end within the medical setting. In another analysis yet to be published, social narratives of the normalisation of menstrual suffering circulate through families, schools, workplaces, and cultural narrative, teaching women to normalise suffering long before they seek medical care (Young & Kirk [in prep]). This life-course pattern helps explain why menstrual disorders are so often under-recognised: when pain becomes synonymous with womanhood, it becomes structurally invisible. However, these narratives are not accepted. In online spaces, women use humour, anger, graphic storytelling and community validation to challenge normalisation and share counter-knowledge outside of the biomedical sphere.
This reminds us that healthcare is never just technical. It is cultural, historical, and deeply political. When women are dismissed in medical settings today, they are confronting legacies of Pandora, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and hysteria. Not as explicit references, but as foundational assumptions about who is credible and who has control. If we want more equitable healthcare, we must dismantle the foundations of medical knowledge itself and continue to centre the voices that medicine has historically worked hardest to silence.
About the Author
Dr Emily Young is a Chartered Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology and Public Health. Her research uses feminist and critical health psychology approaches to examine women’s reproductive health, medical dismissal, and epistemic injustice, with a particular focus on menstrual disorders and lived experience.
References:
Boulding, K. (2015). Pandora as Stomach, Womb, and Wonder in Hesiod’s Theogony. Dionysius, 33, 11-26.
Devereux, C. (2014). Hysteria, feminism, and gender revisited: The case of the second wave. ESC: English Studies in Canada, 40(1), 19-45.
Gottlieb, A. (2020). Menstrual taboos: Moving beyond the curse. The Palgrave handbook of critical menstruation studies, 143-162.
King, H. (2002). Hippocrates’ woman: reading the female body in ancient Greece. Routledge.
Merleau, C. T. (2003). Bodies, Genders and Causation in Aristotle’s Biological and Political Theory. Ancient Philosophy, 23(1), 135-151.
Miller, G. O. (2009). The rhetoric of hysteria in the US, 1830–1930: Suffragists, sirens, psychoses. The University of Arizona.
Young, E. J., & Kirk, H. M. (2025). How Women Discuss Heavy Menstrual Bleeding in Online Forums (“It’s Like Revenge of the Uterus”): Template Approach to Thematic Analysis. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 27, e73532.
Young & Kirk [in prep]. ‘Gilead Was Meant to Be Fiction’: Medical Dismissal and Reproductive Governance in Online Discussions of Medical Interactions Around Heavy Menstrual Bleeding
Young & Kirk [in prep]. “Every Girl Goes Through This”: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Social Normalisation of Heavy Menstrual Bleeding in Online Forums
Reading felt less like engaging with theory and more like reading an explanation for my own life.
I recognised myself in every paragraph.
I started puberty young. I remember telling my mum I was in agony. I was told it was normal. The kind of upbringing where an arm would need to fall off before you went to the GP. So I learned early that pain was something to tolerate.
By 19, I took myself to the GP. That was the first time someone suggested it wasn’t “just normal.” I was diagnosed with PCOS. During the scan, they could only find one ovary. I was told not to worry — it was probably “behind a bit of bowel.” I was also told not to worry unless I wanted children.
That phrase has echoed through my life.
Unless you want children.
The article discusses how women’s health is often framed through reproduction rather than wellbeing. I lived that. My pain mattered only in relation to fertility.
For years I was cycled through pills and contraceptives. What helped most wasn’t medication but a low-GI diet and weight management. That discovery felt almost accidental — as if I had to become my own clinician.
At 25, I fell pregnant. It was ectopic. Emergency surgery. I woke up to learn I had severe endometriosis. My mind went back to that first scan at 19 — the “missing” ovary. I have often wondered if the endometriosis was already there and dismissed because I was young and not actively trying for a baby. I was too young to know better. Too young to insist.
My late twenties and early thirties were defined by IVF. Financially draining. Emotionally consuming. Life on pause. We are incredibly fortunate — we have two beautiful girls. But they came at enormous cost: money, time, energy, identity.
Now at 36, I am back fighting to be seen. The pain is worse than ever. I want a hysterectomy. I am told I am too young.
Too young — despite losing a tube and ovary.
Too young — despite tissue growing where it should not.
Too young — despite having completed my family.
The article speaks about control — how historically, women’s bodies were medicalised and regulated in ways that reflected social priorities more than women’s own experiences. Sitting in appointments today, being told what I may or may not want in the future, I feel that legacy is alive.
And then there are NHS delays. I don’t blame individual clinicians. But structurally, it feels like being stranded on an island waiting for a ship that may or may not come. Pain on pause. Life on hold again.
What this article does brilliantly is connect the past to the present. It explains that dismissal isn’t random — it’s patterned. It’s inherited. It’s cultural. And that validation matters.
If I had read something like this at 19, I might have trusted myself sooner.
Women’s health is not neutral. It never has been. But acknowledging that is the first step toward changing it.