Malicious Midwives, Fruitful Vines, and Bearded Women — Sex, Gender, and Medical Expertise in the Journal

This article is part of an invited series by independent historians, focused on biases and injustice that the New England Journal of Medicine has historically helped to perpetuate.

"To read the pages of the Journal from its founding in 1812 until the mid-20th century was to learn that medical science held women and men to have different bodies, different diseases, different minds, and different social roles based on their sex. For more than two centuries, the Journal has circulated ideas about innate sex differences, in the authoritative language of medicine and science, that played a role in facilitating the exclusion of women from medical practice, the essentialization of women patients to their reproductive roles, the medical surveillance of gender norms, and the mistreatment of intersex people. Much work remains to be done, not only to preserve the dignity and rights of women and people who do not fit neatly into binary sex or gender categories but also to challenge the controlling assumption in much of medical research and clinical practice that there exist thoroughgoing, essential differences between the sexes and that variation outside of narrow definitions of typical maleness and femaleness represents abnormality in need of medical management."