User talk:Mirizarr

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Gender in Traditional Medicine[edit source] In traditional clinical encounters, women and men were treated differently as one could imagine given the time period. Chinese doctor Cheng Maoxian, born in 1581, lived and pracitced medicine in Yangzhou in the 1610s and 1620s. He took diligent care to write case studies of his interactions with his patients and their ailments as well as his prescribed medicines[2]. Doctors such as Maoxian treated men as well as women, however it seems that women were met with more stereotypes imposed by their doctors then men. For example, Cheng told each case study witin social conditions.

In these encounters, between sick women and their male doctors,women were often shy about their issues and made the doctor's work more difficult because they did not know all the symptoms the patient was expereinces. Even if they did confess all their symptoms, doctors, such as Cheng, would condsider the majority of the illness to be linked to some problem concerning the woman's reproductive system or cycle[3]. One of the stories Cheng discussed in his case studies was that of Fan Jisuo's teenage daughter, who could not be diagnosed because she was unwilling to speak on her symptoms. In this partiuclar case, hers involved discharge from her intimate areas. Cheng insisted on asking more about her illness and here, her modesty, her want to protect the information that regarded an intimate part of her body became a frustrating trend that doctors struggled with.

When a woman fell ill, an appropriate adult man was to call the doctor and remain present during the examination, for the woman could not be left alone with the doctor. However, this was not always the case. In particular cases, when a woman dealt with complications with their pregnacy or at birht, older women became involved and assumed the role of the formal authority. Men in these situations would not have much power to interfere.

However, when a doctor's visit was absoluetly neccessary, there existed tension as a breaking of norms may have been needed. In order to properly examine the patient, the doctor's were faced with the task of going beyond the norm of female modesty. As cheng describes, there were four standard methods of diagnosis--looking, asking, listening and smelling and touching (for pulse-taking). In order to maintain some form of modesty, women would often stay hidden behind curtains and screesn. The doctor was allowed to touch enough of her body to complete his exmaination, often just the pulse taking. This would lead to situations where the symptoms and the doctor's diagnosis did not agree and the doctor would have to ask to see more of the patient. [4]

Another example of where we can see the relationship betwee gender and medicine is by analyzing the illustrations that are in the Yazuan yizong jinjian (Imperially-Commissioned Golden Mirror of Medical Learning) which was a textbook and guide to practicing medicine under the Qianlong emperor's Imperial Academy of Medicine. [1] Most images in this book are depeicted as men, implying that there are culturally and historically constructed assumptions about the characteristics of men and women. There was a long standing belief that women's bodies were an imperfect variant of men's. There existed a type of visual androcentrism in Chinese medicine where there was a tendancy to use male figures to represnt the generic human body. This is seen as a result of the tradition in which men were used in generic situtiaons and women were used only in contexts spcifically genered as female.[5]

Yin Yang and Gender[edit source] Yin yang relationships developed a gendered body and was thought of as different depending on if the patient was male for female. In a traditional sense, yin yang relationships could tell the doctor a lot about his patient. Taking the pulse of their patients was important in revealing this kind of information. To doctors during the 16th century, the pulse of females and males were different.

Gender was presumed to influence the movement of energy and a well-trained physician would be expected to read the pulse and should have been able to identify two dozen or more energy flows.[6] Yin and yang name the feminine and masculine aspects of all bodies at large, thus the logic implies that even in nature the differences separating men and women begin at the level of this energy flow. According to Bequeathed Writings of Master Chu writes that the male's yang pulse movement follows an ascending path in "compliance [with cosmic direction] so that the cycle of circulation in the body and the Vital Gate are felt...The female's yin pulse movement follows a defending path against the direction of cosmic influences, so that the nadir and the Gate of Life are felt at the inch position of the left hand".[7]In sum, classical medicine marked yin and yang as high and low on bodies which in turn would be labeled normal or abnormal and gendered either male or female.[2] This would in turn be eventuated by doctors to determine their reproductive capacity.