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The First Female Doctor in Britain Spent 56 Years Disguised as a Man
- devereaux 10y agoWhat a beautiful story. Some people will say there is no discrimination anymore. Personally, I don't buy that - and I'm speaking from personal experience. Even in the most enlightened places like HN, it is helpful to impersonate on line the kind of person that others readers would expect me to be, vs. being who I really am. You know the old saying- on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!
- intrasight 10y agoIt was a beautiful story - and one that I wasn't familiar with. I do hope there are more such waiting to be revealed! I'll never forget seeing that comic in The New Yorker in '93. A colleague of mine clipped it out and pasted it on the wall behind his desk. Also in that year, the New York Times asked readers at the end of the year how many times the word "internet" had occurred in the newspaper during the year. I believe the answer was ~200.
- duskwuff 10y agoThe Joy of Tech did an updated version of that comic a few years back: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1862.html http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1862.html
- discombobulate 10y agoThere seems to be discrimination[0]. [0] https://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-over-men-stem-faculty-positions https://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred... Edit: Wrong link. Someone could have told me explicitly.
- finid 10y agoWhat's the point of that link?
- discombobulate 10y agoEvidence backing up my claim.
- finid 10y agoI made that comment because the link pointed to an RSS Feed.
- vertex-four 10y agoYou linked to an RSS feed, not a web page.
- discombobulate 10y agoI just realised after getting downvoted. Thanks for the heads up!
- finid 10y agoSome people will say there is no discrimination anymore. Who's saying that? There's discrimination everywhere you look, and it doesn't have to take the form detailed in the article.
- vertex-four 10y agoA surprising amount of people feel like gay marriage was the final thing to implement for an equal society. There's an argument that equal treatment under the law results in equality in practice, which is of course incorrect, even if we did have equal treatment under the law (some things disproportionately affect minority groups, so just saying "we do it to everyone" doesn't help).
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoTrue, and it's actually worse than that--we finally have a national marriage equality law, but we don't have national employment or housing equality, which should be even more fundamental. And God help you if you happen to be trans. There's a great deal of bitterness from poorer GLBTs that they've been essentially thrown under the bus by the gay rights movement. Marriage is important, but there's a lot of fair-weather activists saying "mission accomplished" when the basic survival needs of millions of people are still completely unprotected.
- Spivak 10y ago> bitterness from poorer GLBTs that they've been essentially thrown under the bus by the gay rights movement This one seems weird to me as someone who is part of that community; the two issues seem orthogonal unless we're talking specifically about things like discrimination against LGBT employees and LGBT kids that are thrown out of their homes. I guess the best explanation is that some people base too much of their identity on their sexuality and forget that they can also be active in more general human rights issues.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Rapzid 10y agoThis is interesting https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/19/women-really-are-better-doctors-study-suggests/?utm_term=.12e90a928120 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/19/women... . I imagine that if male doctors became so less preferred that one tried to pass himself off as female... The patients would robbed of their right to make an informed healthcare choice. That would be considered a type of fraud? What of discrimination then? What happens when studies show females are better doctors than males? As a male, I would certainly feel compelled to choose a female physician in such a world in the absence of other quantitative data to make a comparison. Surgeons are a little easier to vet with well-documented outcomes..
- judahmeek 10y agoActually, studies already show that females make better doctors: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2593255 http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullart...
- rokosbasilisk 10y agohave you actually read the article? It was a very specific study on elderly care, not general out patient and very suspect. I would not even remotely conclude female or male doctors are better than each other from it.
- debno 10y agoOh, here come all the comments explaining how everyone is oppressed except for fucking-white-males.
- jsmeaton 10y agoKind of proved the point with this comment.
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. We're hoping for thoughtful conversation here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13247575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13247575 and marked it off-topic.
- dominotw 10y agoNow that the pendulum has swung to the other side with female doctors outnumbering male doctors in NHS. There are questions being raised if this "too many female doctors" phenomenon is contributing to doctor shortage faced by NHS [1]. 1. The Problem With Female Doctors http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/27/the-problem-with-female-doctors/#51fa7c3b3080 http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/27/the-probl...
- vertex-four 10y agoOf course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children - and yes, that means making sacrifices re their work - as women do. Otherwise, we're still clinging onto the old concept of the man being the breadwinner and the woman looking after the children, just in a new age where it's not economically possible to raise children on one wage alone, and that's bound to cause issues as we see in that article.
- dominotw 10y agoyou are right. In the process we might saving thousands of lives every year. New research estimates that if all physicians were female, 32,000 fewer Americans would die every year. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/12/female-doctors-superiority/511034/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/12/female-do...
- vertex-four 10y ago> To explain the discrepancy, the researchers point to past studies that have shown female physicians are more likely to provide preventive care and psychosocial counseling. Female doctors are also more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines. It doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to teach men the importance of these things, though it might be a systemic thing (i.e. boys and girls getting taught different things about interacting with others from an early age, leading to different ways of thinking later in life). I'd like to know why men are less likely to do these things - an assumption that it's something intrinsic to male biology would be a huge leap.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- saycheese 10y agoStrange how Atlas Obscura does not mention the doctor's letter regarding their observations of James' body to issue a death certificate. Given this information is on the first search result for "James Barry doctor" which happened to be the Wikipedia entry for Barry, it makes me wonder why this was left out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)#Death
- ourmandave 10y agoIt wasn’t until after Barry’s death in 1865, that the doctor’s secret was finally discovered. 1865 was the year the American Civil War ended. In 1867 Dr. Quinn (Medicine Woman) started her practice in Colorado Springs. Coincidence?
- saycheese 10y agoAppear more likely that if Dr. Quinn (a fictional character) was based on someone, it would have been this person: http://twrpcactusrose.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-life-dr-quinn-medicine-woman.html http://twrpcactusrose.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-life-dr-quin... Also might be worth noting that "While in London, she lectured extensively and became the first woman to have her name entered in the British Medical Register." - which appears to conflict with the facts provided in the article that's the subject of these comments.
- rustynails77 10y agoWhile everyone discriminates, I think the older generation is more in touch with egalitarianism than your generation. I'll give you a few examples, Today, people refuse to acknowledge that domestic violence has male victims. This has NEVER happened in history. It's a modern phenomenon to reject victims based on gender. Perform a Google search for the entire year of 2015. You will not find one single picture of a male victim of domestic violence. Yet, ABS puts the figure at about 30% of victims as being male. Some Australian politicians have tried to legislate DV based on gender! My local magazine has pictures of only girls on the front cover almost every issue. 50 years ago, you would almost always have a girl standing next to a boy. We refuse to talk about suicide rates (80% male) or homelessness (75%+ male). In fact, most Australian media will only talk about homelessness of women. http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/2049.0Main%20Features22011 http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/2049.0Mai... http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting-suicide/facts-and-stats http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting-suicide/... A government organisation in Australia called 1800respect bombarded the TV with ads saying that the root cause of domestic violence was young boys "it's a boy thing" was the catch cry. They purposely targeted the demographic with the highest suicide rates who are most vulnerable to criticism. Or Hillary Clinton's exit speech. What about this gem that not one media outlet commented on. Hillary's message of exclusion was clear. If you're a young boy you are not even worth mentioning. "And to all of the little __girls__ who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams." http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13570328/hillary-clinton-concession-speech-full-transcript-2016-presidential-election http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13570328/hillary-clinton-conces... These are all legacies that have been created within the last decade. Never in history have we played such nasty gender games. It is the older people that are banging the drums saying "what the hell is going on?", not the younger generation. I am yet to hear younger people chime in to the conversation. I've had some doozy arguments with younger people who talk about revenge (to which I say "for what?") or "no, that's OK, that's equality". Now, you could argue that it's not the younger generation that's controlling the media. However, there are a lot of young people on Facebook and Snapchat. Where's the outrage at the extreme prejudice we see today from the younger people? It's just not there. What may surprise you is that I don't support a men's movement because of how toxic feminism is as a gender based movement. What I reject is the extreme gender prejudice that is so popular today. Almost every media in the western world is in the collusion and there appears to be no bar too low they will stoop to. When I see young kids in droves calling out The Verge, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, BBC News, Fores, Vox, Vulture, Beast and all of the other prejudiced media outlets, I will know that you are right. Until then, I will assume the majority of people who give two hoots about egalitarianism are the older generation of men and women.