Health and medicine: gendering biomedicine, sex difference and clinical practice

This chapter considers modern medical constructs and practices relating to gender that impacted the health and wellbeing of people living in the long nineteenth century, from roughly 1750-1950. 'Gender' here refers to cultural ideas about the physiology of men, women, transgender people and third sexes, the latter who in the West were often referred to as hermaphrodites (in the eighteenth and ninteteenth centuries) or as various forms of intersex (in the twentieth century). This was the period of the emergence of western scientific biomedicine which produced a spectacular array of new binary ideas about men's and women's physiologies, hormones, patterns of ageing; psychiatric ideas about sexual variations thought specific to one sex or another; as well as the modern medical observation of diverse genders and sexes. It was a period that witnessed a wholesale displacement of women folk healers with university-trained clinicians, who were largely men until the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the view that women were the sicker sex and that female reproductive cycles represented an exception to the human norm underpinned the widespread practice in western biomedicine of using only young adult men as experimental test subjects. These developments created enduring legacies of gender bias that continue in western biomedicine today.