This is so upsetting because genuinely, historically medical illustrations of women have been very taboo and marginalized at least in Europe and the colonized Americas, and restriction on womenâs studying and practicing of medicine + conservative values meaning it was treated as bad for a man to study a womanâs anatomy too closely (MAYBE outside of pregnancy) whether that was to illustrate/diagram or literally, actually diagnose/treat, quite literally left doctors disproportionately ignorant about gynecology and got women and girls killed due to it being a blind spot.
I did a deep study in college of several historical anatomical manuals and I was always shocked by how many fewer women there were depicted. One was literally 74 men and 2 women, both pregnant. And with the women posed to conceal the vulva and breasts. Many depictions of fetuses are all but disembodied to avoid acknowledging the body around them.
I cannot over-emphasize how much the revolutionizing of gynecological illustration actually contributed to and dovetailed with serious considerations of things like cervical cancer treatment and even just developing proper medical examinations. The (male) illustrator who sort of broke this openâMax BrĂśdelâdid so in 1894. He was the first person in Europe and the US to do extensive, detailed illustration of examination and surgical techniques as well as the appearance of healthy and variously-diseased body parts.
Serious health education for women and girls including this type of information only started becoming really accessible in the 1970s, 50 years ago. That was BECAUSE OF FEMINISTS. Look up Our Bodies, Our Selves.
Medical illustration as a field, in Europe, has existed for thousands of years.
The ability for girls to have books written for them, which they understand, about body health topics at an age where constant new things are happening with little way to assess whatâs ânormalâ can be the difference between someone learning that thereâs something unhealthy going on with them or not, or knowing to report something to a doctor. It can be the thing that keeps them from getting preventably ill. Itâs not minor!
It might sound silly to bring ridiculously-deep history up when talking about a girlsâ body education book, but I need people to understand that this isnât about men. Itâs about the bodies of women and girls being so chronically sexualized that most people cannot conceive of a possibility that any of them could be depicted nonsexually, and that being in turn used as a way of denying medical education and care from women and girls. This assumption also has issues which donât just affect men. It premises that any man depicting a womanâs genitals medically must be a sexual predator because he is presumed to be attracted to women; I wonder, would these folks react the same way to a gay man drawing it? Or what about me? Iâm a lesbian with reproductive disabilities whoâs interested in medical illustration; am I a danger to women for making and displaying detailed art of my own body from surgery photos? Or from drawing off photos of bodies donated to science, which are some of the most common models? Or do I get a pass because I have the same body parts? (I donât, with myself; I have had people interpret those illustrations which contained the inside of my uterus as pornographic because the rest of my nude body in a nonsexual pose was also visible. I donât even want to know what kind of lesbophobic tripe would result if Iâd drawn for this book).
But the real questions should be âWhy, in 2026, is anyone accepting the premise that a medical illustration (likely referencing a photo taken in a medical setting either of a living person who is anonymized and photographed with permission, or of a literal cadaver), is âpornographicâ (which would be sexual exploitation if that was occurring) material of children?â and âDo you understand that to foment a fear of experts producing educational material for girls about their bodies is inherently also inciting fear of educating those girls about their bodies at all?â and âWhy do you think it is OK to continue the pattern of sexualizing women and in this case literal children for existing, and respond by hiding?â
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