Unwell Women

While men were more likely to become severely ill from the coronavirus than women, and older people were far more likely than the young, long Covid had exactly the reverse profile. Its sufferers were disproportionately young to middle-aged women, often with pre-existing diagnoses of depression or anxiety.

We no longer possess the mimeographed outline of our findings that we took to the conference, but the central idea was that the medical profession as we knew it (still over 90 percent male) had replaced and driven out a much older tradition of female lay healing, including both midwifery and a range of healing skills, while closing medical educatio

A comunidade médica não se interessa particularmente por levar as dores das mulheres a sério.

There was not a lot to read at the time, the entire genre of books on “Women and . . .” having yet to be invented. Sometimes, in conventional histories of American medicine, we found tantalizing references to a time when women predominated as healers—but only as an indication of how “primitive” American medicine had been before the rise of the mode