Barbara Brookes
The April 2018 photo of heavily pregnant New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at Buckingham Palace was more than beautiful, it represented a landmark moment in political life. Pregnancy, once invisible, was centre stage.
In the early twentieth century, respectable citizens kept pregnancy under wraps. It was part of that troublesome thing: women’s bodies. Those bodies bled, ballooned during pregnancy, and leaked milk during lactation. None of these things seemed appropriate in public life. They appeared to make women closer to nature, while men assumed the mantle of culture. Women’s bodily changes were matters to be hidden, controlled, and best not discussed.
For hundreds of years doctors have been placed on a pedestal, achieving a form of celebrity and authority over the lay person. Only doctors, went the logic, understood the confusing puzzle that is the human body. Only doctors could translate its strange signs and symptoms into a language that made sense. This attitude gave rise to paternalistic medicine, a system that implies that an individual’s healthcare is the sole responsibility of the physician. Paternalistic medicine gives the physician the power to make whatever decision they think is in the patient’s best interests, regardless of the actual capacity or desires of the patient.
For any medical student, there’s something quite hard to forget about walking into the anatomy lab for the very first time. My shoes squeaked against the blue linoleum floor as I wove my way through rows of grey body bags lying on stainless steel trolleys under that harsh fluorescent white light. What I found challenging about my first encounter with a corpse was that it was so undeniably and certainly human. Structurally there was not much difference between me and the body that lay on the trolley.