Earlier this month, I attended an eye-opening event at UNH Manchester, the 2025 Winter Symposium. At the Symposium, several dozen students, including first-year students, presented professional-quality posters based on work they had done in various courses. I attended at the invitation of my friend Reese Bove, a 2025 graduate of Hopkinton High School.
Reese presented two posters. One documented a medical research project that I am not smart enough to understand. But her second poster, for a medical history class, hit me right between the eyes.
The topic of Reese’s medical history poster was the evolution of treatments for breast cancer. In it, she had a section devoted to Betty Ford, wife of President Gerald Ford. I was in high school and college during the Ford administration, so I remember the media coverage of Betty Ford’s diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. What struck me in Reese’s poster was her statement that the ultimate decisionmaker with regard to Betty Ford’s treatment was Gerald Ford, not because he was the president but because he was Betty’s husband.
I cannot imagine having the final say over my wife’s health care, but the days when that was the rule were not so long ago. I was genuinely shocked to learn this.
Reese’s poster was not the only medical history presentation that pointed out ways in which women, as both patients and practitioners, have been medically marginalized for hundreds of years.
A poster on the history of child birth in the United States described the medicalization of female reproductive health care and its removal from midwives and the female sphere and its assignment to doctors and the male sphere.
Another poster described multiple instances of surgical experimentation conducted by a white male doctor, James Sims, on enslaved women of color. The subjects of his experiments did not have the benefit of anesthesia, and their operations were often conducted before audiences of onlookers.
A third poster described the establishment of medical standards based on male anatomy and physiology and the ways in which those standards have been materially detrimental to female patients.
I did not get to see all the medical-history posters at the Symposium, but one clear theme shined through: in any number of ways, for several hundred years, American medicine has given women the short end of the stick. That’s information worth knowing, especially for me, as a man.
Now here’s the thing. In light of the current war on woke, I have grave concerns about the future visibility of stories like the ones I was able to learn from the UNH Manchester Winter Symposium.
In the current environment, in which so many stories are being labeled “women’s history” or “ethnic history” and then erased, it is easy to see anti-woke activists calling the stories I’ve mentioned here divisive, DEI-based women’s history and then trying to push them back into the shadows. That would be a mistake.
The story of medical experiments conducted on Black women who were treated as less than fully human is not “women’s history” or “Black history.” It is history. Period. Full stop. And if we allow a whitewashing of the stories of the Black women who were so ill treated by Dr. Sims, the story that remains is the story of the brilliant white male doctor who heroically advanced medical knowledge. Isn’t that just “white male history” masquerading as “history”?
On a recent visit to Montgomery, Alabama, my wife saw a statute of Dr. Sims on the grounds of the Alabama State House. The statute called him the father of modern gynecology. It seems ironic that gynecology should have a father when so many of its mothers paid such a steep price for Dr. Sims’ fatherhood.
So what is the problem with a version of history that lionizes Dr. Sims and ignores his research subjects? An anti-woke, anti-DEI history of Dr. Sims’ work, one that focuses on the white male doctor at the expense of the enslaved women of color who were his research subjects, doesn’t just do a disservice to people of color. It poorly serves all of us.
As a person with nearly every privilege our society has to bestow, I want to have the information I need to temper my appreciation for medical advancements with an understanding of the very real costs they may have extracted from people who do not share my privileges. And by knowing about those costs in the past, I can be vigilant about looking out for similar situations in the present, situations in which those without privilege are exploited for the benefit of those of us who have it.