Barbara Worthy
Special to The Lake Report
In the age of Hippocrates, had Shawna Butts, assistant curator for the Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum, visited a male physician with any kind of abdominal “condition,” she would have been told it was caused by the “animal within an animal.”
Her uterus was a beast inside of her and she was at the mercy of its whims. And throughout modern history, doctors continued to blame women’s pain on errant behaviours, mental weakness or even a “wandering womb.”
“Women’s health has been dominated by myths, mysteries and wacky treatments for centuries,” said Butts.
“And the result has been a system of misdiagnosis, mistreatment and dehumanizing of the female experience.”
No wonder, then, that women became hysterical.
“When men saw a doctor, they would receive a careful and somewhat professional diagnosis,” said Butts, “whereas women’s illnesses were often described as ‘hysteria,’ and always under-researched.”
Worse, to counter some of those mysteries, women were experimented upon and physically deformed by “well-meaning” doctors.
Much of that so-called research was forced upon enslaved or uneducated women and continues into the 21st century.
Government-funded eugenics programs were an explicit part of U.S. policy well into the 20th century, aimed at Black, Indigenous, poor and immigrant communities.
And the forced hysterectomies on women in U.S. detention centres, as recently as 2020, produced a flood of comparisons to Nazi Germany.
Many of these issues will be highlighted in the upcoming lecture at the museum, “Historically Hysterical: A Look at Women’s Health and Health Care,” on Thursday, May 18 at 7:30 p.m.
Admission for members is free, guests are $10. Call the museum to reserve your seat: 905-468-3912.
International Museum Day 2023 also falls on May 18 and admission to the NOTL Museum is free for the entire day, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Also, as of May 1, the museum is operating on its summer schedule, open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The current exhibit, “All Along the Waterfront,” closes on May 22.
Already held over by popular demand, the exhibit examines the long and complex relationship this town has enjoyed with the Niagara River and Lake Ontario.
The museum’s next exhibit, “Bound and Determined,” opening June 2, highlights Niagara’s Black history and enslavement in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
For more information, go to notlmuseum.ca.
