What <em>This Is Going to Hurt </em>Leaves Out
Up until rather recently, the history of gynecological health was written and recorded by men who seemed to have an inordinate degree of suspicion regarding vaginas. Aristotle, considered by some to be the founder of biology, believed that being born female was an innate sign of deficiency and a “departure” from nature. James Marion Sims, the inventor of the speculum who performed medical experiments on enslaved women, wrote in his unfinished autobiography, “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” Adam Kay, a former National Health Service doctor in obstetrics and gynecology (or “brats and twats,” as his medical-school peers referred to it), wrote in his 2017 best-selling memoir, This Is Going to Hurt, that his least favorite part of the job involved the urogynecology clinic: “a bunch of nans with pelvic floors like quicksand and their uteri stalagtite-ing into their thermals.”
I don’t mean to
