Speaker 1 00:01:09 We're listening to right on radio on cafe in 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. I'm Josh Webber tonight on, right on radio David FEDEC. We'll be talking with the author. Kwame Dawes does poetry collection, Nebraska and evocative collection of poems that explores the intersection of memory home in artistic invention. He is chancellor's professor of English and Glenna Lucci editor of Prairie schooner at the university of Nebraska in Lincoln. Dawes is the author of 21 books of poetry and author or editor of numerous books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays. Also a quick shout out to Lisa Hoss camp out of now, then who's listening online. She works at Shutterfly and is the mother of Rachel and David. Thanks again for the incredible barbecue on Sunday. Lisa, she's a sweet person, but don't let her fool you. She makes a mean stuffed jalapeno and I'm Dave fed again. I can't tell you how happy I am that now then got mentioned on our radio program. One of my favorite towns in Minnesota, also this evening savvy male speaks with Eleanor Cleghorne about her work, unwell women, misdiagnosis and myths in a manmade, a trailblazing conversation, starting history of women's health from the earliest medical ideas about women's illnesses to hormones and auto immune diseases brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative, all of this and more so stay, stay tuned to write on radio and
Speaker 1 00:03:28 Is that you, can you hear me? We're still hooking up these zoom link for our interview with Kwame Dawes from the university of Nebraska. You have audio Kwame, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Very good. Good evening. Thank you for joining us tonight.
Speaker 2 00:03:53 Uh, I, I can't express, uh, what really, how honored we are to have you on the program. Um, I, I wish our listeners realized, uh, that there was so much more to say about your biography and your history than we already did, but, uh, uh, what, uh, what an accomplishment of letters. Uh, so it's a privilege to have you on the show, say, Kwame, we least, you like to start with, uh, our reading and we're going to talk about your latest collection of poetry, Nebraska among other things. Uh, but before we do that, if you don't mind, could you please, uh, just give us a little, um, I don't know, maybe a quick summary of, uh, your life in poetry, which is nearly impossible to do given the depth of it, but, uh, born in Ghana, um, and found your way to, um, the great Plains of Nebraska. How did that happen?
Speaker 3 00:04:41 Um, yeah, I mean, there's a lot between being born in Ghana and then getting
Speaker 2 00:04:48 Glasgow
Speaker 3 00:04:50 I'm 59 years old, so right. Um, yeah, no, I, I, I was born in Ghana, as you said. I grew up there until I was about nine or 10 years old. And then my family moved to Jamaica to Kingston Jamaica. My father, uh, was Jamaican and my mother is <inaudible> she's from Ghana. So my father moved to Ghana to teach. Um, he is a writer and a professor and also, you know, arts administrate and did a number of other things, but he went to Jamaica to Ghana to teach, and that's where they met. And, um, had, did they come to us as kids? So we moved back to Jamaica when my grandmother was aging.
Speaker 3 00:05:40 And so then I grew up in Jamaica from age nine until, uh, well into my twenties. I went to Canada to do a PhD there and, um, and then moved to the states. My first landing in the U S was South Carolina, uh, Columbia link, Sumter, South Carolina, a small town. And then, and then I lived in Columbia, South Carolina. So we lived in South Carolina for almost two decades, um, before finally moving here to Nebraska, which is where, which was about 10 years ago. So that's, that's a story and in between travels all over the world. And so
Speaker 2 00:06:22 On, of course, of course, and so many books, um, and so much influence in the world of poetry. But before we talk about that, let's give our listeners a taste of your new collection, Nebraska. Do you have a particular poem in mind?
Speaker 3 00:06:37 Um, well, what I struggled with in thinking about it was, you know, forms of different lens. Yeah. So I've, I've, I've figured that since this is radio, um, I'll do something relatively short. Um, and I, one of the rituals of my, my writing life is to write occasional poems about my children, I would say about, but that's a bit, um, we, we like to say we write poems about, but the truth is the they happen to be in the poems.
Speaker 2 00:07:19 I see.
Speaker 3 00:07:22 Um, and there's a joke in the family. I have three kids and they're grown people now, but there's a joke about counting how many dedicated forms who has the most. Um, so, so Aqua my youngest, this is a poem for her. It's called purple for ed for walking. I drew my hand over the lumpy bloom of the spray of purple. I stripped away my fingers, stained purple, put it to my nose, the minty honey, a perfume. So aggressively pleasant. I gave it to you to smell my daughter. And you pulled away as if I was giving you a Palm full of worse deceptions smell the way the air changes because of purple and green. This is the promise I make to you. I'll never give you a fist full of west, just the surprise of purple and the scent of rain.
Speaker 2 00:08:28 Thank you, Kwame. That was call me, dad's reading from his latest collection of poems, Nebraska. Beautiful poem. Thank you for choosing that one. I love it for a lot of reasons. Uh, and, uh, it's, it's about people. It's about people in your life. It's about you. Um, that's a theme in this book. It's a theme of, for most poets is the poet him or herself, but it's also a poem about place. And, and I want to start there if we could. Um, uh, in terms of, you know, Nebraska, when you titled this book Nebraska, when you wrote books about place in here, uh, was that your intent from the beginning or did these just naturally sort of come together over time? Did you intend to, uh, put this book together to, to talk to us about your place in the great Plains, which there's more going on here than that, but, um, it's a prominent theme.
Speaker 3 00:09:22 Yeah, well, the short answer is no, but, but it's a disingenuous answer. Uh, if, if, if we pay up to, if I, you know, if I try to talk a little bit about my writing life and my writing practice, um, for a tree is for me, I think I can fairly say now that it's a way for me to, to understand what I'm feeling or what I'm thinking about. Um, and therefore my poetry is always a book about place. As much as my poetry may be engaged in past and history. It's about the present moment that Elliot phrase time present and time past are both perhaps contained in time future, but all the time is eternally present. Um, and, and in a sense, then everywhere I've been, I think there's a record of my presence there and accounting of it kind of reckoning of it through poetry, poetry, therefore is the law is a sort of charting of, of sentiment of thought of feeling and experience.
Speaker 3 00:10:31 So, so I, at one point the book came together because, um, I thought that there was a, I think there was an effort by the university, what they wanted to do something to, to honor Mary, um, uh, which was, which is a nice thought. And so I said, well, what would be good for the guests would be like little, uh, little takeaways and little small chap books or something like that for each of them. And I thought something on Nebraska would be nice. And I said, I'll just look for some poems on Nebraska. Um, and at that point, I couldn't say I had poems in Nebraska because I write a lot. So I just don't know what I have. And so I did a search through all the work that I had in the last 10 years, and there was a tremendous amount and, you know, and I realized, well, this is a little bigger than that.
Speaker 3 00:11:23 Um, and so in conversation with the university of Nebraska press, um, I mean, I put it together as a kind of working manuscript. And then I said, well, would you be willing to publish it? And they, they were very keen on doing that. So the collection came about because I was thinking about putting together these poems that I've already written about Nebraska. Um, and, and that's how that's very often hold my collections for a while. I don't, sometimes I set out to write a book, but that's a different exercise altogether. Sure. But putting together a book is also another writing practice. It's um, it's, uh, you know, I always think of, um, Bob Molly, uh, two albums, Exodus and Kaia, which came out in the late seventies. And the truth is that Molly moved to England in a bit of exile after he was shot and spent about eight months just playing music, writing music, writing songs, and then they constructed these two albums from all the songs that they had. And there's a sense in which he was rewriting the songs by ordering them the way that they were being. And in a sense for me, poetry, putting the poem collection of poems together is, is something like that. There's a little bit of gamesmanship and just being naughty by calling the booklet brass, I did a Google search and I said, nobody's done that. That's kind of crazy.
Speaker 2 00:12:55 Well, it wasn't ever a booster. It wasn't there a Bruce Springsteen. Exactly.
Speaker 3 00:13:02 And I said, that's it, apparently this is the thing that people do. So I said, well, and it's funny that the current state foot ran into me a few, you know, a month after the book came out and he says, damn Yukon. I was going to use that. I'm surprised Ted Kooser,
Speaker 2 00:13:24 Uh, Ted. Kooser never used that. That surprises me. I think of him. I think of Timothy Murphy. I don't know if he know that name of poet. Yeah. And, uh, um, I love the great Plains. I'm a Northern Plains boy. And, uh, you mentioned something about place earlier. How I, what I heard was, you know, respond to place from where we've come from and who we are and that sort of thing. How was it to be a port from Ghana raised in Jamaica, taught in the south, and now you're in the great Plains, as opposed to a Ted Kooser who maybe it was born and raised there and lived most of his life on the Plains. I don't know that for sure. But, um, yeah, no, he did. He was born in Iowa. So how do you, you can't get inside Ted's head. I called him Ted. I've never met him. Uh, but, uh, uh, how do you, how do you react to the Plains, um, differently? Do you think? Or what does it mean to be <inaudible>?
Speaker 3 00:14:23 Those are, you know, there are many questions embedded in that. I mean, there's, there's the idea. I mean, it's, there's a, there's a, an assumption that the port me, the artists is necessarily the same as the human being who enters that space. I, I don't think they are unrelated and I think they feed each other, but in a sense, it is a given that I am, I'm an alien and I'm an interloper in this landscape. It's, uh it's and, and that doesn't make me at all unique. Uh, it makes every body here pretty much except native the native people, unless people want to get funny about that, but it certainly means that we are all in a sense interlopers. And, um, and I've always been aware of that. I come from a tradition that understands the idea of migration forced and on force, uh, the idea of having to create homes in multiple places.
Speaker 3 00:15:25 And, and I just think that, uh, some, some groups, some cultural groups may have lost that sense of, of uprooting and landing because of the lack of practice or thought of it. But I think, I think that the writers and the artists tend to go as deep into that queer, you know, as, as, as all of us do. So for me, this was, this was my last, um, my last landing, uh, with the possibility that I made, I might uproot again. Uh, and so for what that means to me is that I, I must understand what my body is doing in that space. I must understand the people that I'm meeting in that space. I must learn. I must learn the language of, of the sky, the weather, um, the, the, the texture of the place, the seasons, all of these things are very much a part of what happens to one's body.
Speaker 3 00:16:27 Um, the, so, so there's the combination of the sense of displacement and then the, the ritual of, of settling in, um, and, and, and, and my poetry, I think, especially in these poems of Nebraska, clearly exercise this question of yeah. Of what does it mean to be, to be, to be home and not, and yet not home. I think that's healthy for port. I think that helps support. I think poets and artists and writers, um, sort of have a perspective that allows them to be inside a place and yet outside of it. Yeah. Uh, and, and, and that, that enriches that tension and riches and riches art, because I think it, it, it lends insight. It learns, it also lends a certain kind of empathy. Um, uh, w w w not just with the space, but with those people who don't feel they belong in that space. Right. Right.
Speaker 2 00:17:26 Well, I'm already feeling frustrated that this interview is going to end much too soon. I have so many questions for you. And, uh, I would love to take a class with you, uh, professor, because I think it must be amazing. Uh, you mentioned words like migration and end up rooting. I want to jump to your work on the new generation, African poets, Chatbooks. They're just tremendous a contribution of thank you for that work. Um, in box that I have of the many that are produced, I've lost track, um, you and your co editor, uh, I believe it's Chris, uh, Bonnie, if I'm saying that correctly. Yeah. Yeah. It is no exaggeration to suggest that for many of the younger generations of African poets, the tradition that has the greatest immediate impact impact is the one that is associated with the spoken word scene that has taken these countries by storm is traditions are rooted in hip hop and all of its attended forces and influences.
Speaker 2 00:18:19 I was just, um, kind of excited and intrigued by this idea of these cultural forces, moving across oceans, through cultures, within cultures and shaping, and of course, AF African literary culture and other artistic culture being influenced by Africa and this sort of feedback loop, if that's, you know, a correct term and in delicate terms to use in this regard. But, uh, um, that's not much of a question, but I'm gonna leave it there and hand it over to you to talk about how does that happen? How does these young African poets becomes influenced that? It's uh,
Speaker 3 00:18:56 Yeah, I think, I think I do. I do think that what we are seeing is, uh, uh, circling back, um, you know, you can't talk about hip hop without talking about reggae dance hall song, song system. Uh, you can't talk about those differences without talking about the mento, the, the folk music, the folk traditions, the, the African retention. So in a sense when hip hop emerges, despite all its trappings and sort of capitalism and all of those kinds of things, it's still fundamentally an African music. It's an African conception, it's an African, uh, survival, uh, a function of survival and, and therefore it, and therefore by the, the mere cosmetics of it, they're just the superficial part of it is that Africans have always been in dialogue with themselves across diaspora. I think one of the, one of the peculiar things about colonialism is that it's constructed this idea that nations existed yet the entire business of whether it was slavery or post-slavery existence was of trading across bodies.
Speaker 3 00:20:06 There'd be bodies that have moved from South Carolina to, to, to Barbados from Barbados and back and forth. And therefore there was all this food moving back and forth from Africa and all that. So that cross-fertilization makes complete sense. Um, but so I think, I think like reggae did like, uh, like salsa did like, um, uh, moringa and all of these music forms that enter the African imagination. And then the African artists from Congo from South Africa and source of a would do something with it. I think, I think this is what has happened with, uh, the power of the spoken word, which is, which draws from the oral tradition. Um, but, but as you can tell from the, from that, that's just one aspect of what has the, there's another tradition that these African ports have, have, have, have an, having a rich tradition of, of proverbial and poetic, uh, strength that, that, that sometimes has been ignored.
Speaker 3 00:21:06 And I think that feeds their work. It gives them a sense of, uh, a sense of place and confidence. Um, and it's something that is a massive contribution to, to the world poetry. And we, we, you know, in, in, in five, six years, we've published almost a hundred African poets. It's amazing. The remarkable meaning of that is lies in what, what was not before. In other words, that, that we could do this means that that absence had existed for so long. Um, and that that's been a tragedy, and I think that's what we're redressing because what we bring to it, <inaudible>, um, all the writers, um, or your, or your gun, um, you know, if there's just all these younger, these emerging and these major writers were completely transforming the way that poetry is, is, is understood in the world, what a tragedy that those voices just didn't have, have that the technology that, that publishing brings and, and what a blessing
Speaker 2 00:22:10 To have that, no, I can't stress enough to our listeners and they should Google new generation, African poets, chap box set, or your name Kwame Davis, and, uh, take a look at them because you want at least one of these boxes on your bookshelf, you really do. It is a box of Chatbooks. They're beautiful. And
Speaker 3 00:22:26 They're beautiful. Yeah. These African artists and it just, yeah, it's been great if you love
Speaker 2 00:22:31 It. Yeah. See you, you will love these, um, somewhat related. And we could talk about that subject too, for the better part of an hour, um, in back to your collection of poems, Nebraska, uh, in addition to place and family and your own body and mortality. Another theme that for me in the book is socially related sorts of themes or ideas, um, uh, things that are going on in America today, that kind of thing. Um, civil unrest, I think, uh, to, to what degree does that inform your work? And, and even I'll just put it more directly. Maybe we get this question from students is what's the role of poultry, uh, today?
Speaker 3 00:23:13 Yeah, well, there's no, there's no singular role of poetry today. Um, and, and there's no role of poetry that existed. It has not always existed. I think what we can say quite confidently, because poetry is one of the oldest art forms in existence, as long as we've had the technology of voice and writing, there's been poetry, uh, in all cultures. So the question is, why do, why do cultures still have, why have they continued to persist this peculiar thing called poetry? And it's because they persisted with this thing called language. They've persisted with this thing called beauty. And there's a way in which there's an intimacy to poetry, even when poetry is, has grand ambitions to speak about history and so on and so forth. There is a sense in which we can always go to poetry to understand the history of sentiment history books.
Speaker 3 00:24:11 Don't write about the history of sentiment history books. Don't write about the history of love, right? History books. Don't write about the, the history of mourning and death. They, they write about movements of society movements in the world, but they don't necessarily write about the lived experience in the moment, but you, you can read Sophos fragments and you begin to understand something how many thousand years ago, uh, you can, you can read the poetry of, of, of Phyllis Wheatley and suddenly you're in, in a, in a plantation world, um, in, um, in America, in America where slavery exists. You know, you can read the Psalms and suddenly you're in, in, in, in, in the Plains of Palestine and, and, and, and people are looking at the, the Hills for when come their help. There is, uh, there is, there is that capacity to understand us in that moment.
Speaker 3 00:25:02 And because poets persist in the world, we, we chart, we map the history of, of sentiment and thought and experience in a way that is very powerful and very true to the moment and for better, for worse, that, that continues. So, so the, the question of why poetry answered by the ways in which people turn to poetry, and when they turn to poetry, um, and people turn to poetry when they're trying to find the language to speak the ineffable, the difficult and complex. Yeah. And to, to communicate that. And I think, I think ports, that's what we created and that's what we work in. So I think poetry will persist. Um, I am humbled by that tradition and I want it to be as good in the position as possible.
Speaker 2 00:25:55 Oh, I love that. I love that. Uh, and for our ladies, ladies, gentlemen, listeners, out there, um, the audition you hear right now from professor does shows up in his poems and his writing, by the way, you mentioned Bob Marley earlier, and one of your many books is Bob Marley, lyrical genius. Um, it's on my list. Um, I want to hear a little bit about that. I know Josh is going to give me a two-minute warning of some sort or some kind of word. Okay. I gotta wrap her up, but we love him. Uh,
Speaker 3 00:26:27 Well, listen, just quickly. Lyrical genius is probably, if you, you know, it still remains the authority, the book on Bob Marley's lyrics. If you, if you, if you're missing something, you don't know what no man or cry means by the book. And yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:26:41 That's as good a plug as any, we'd have to sing it, even though if we don't know what we're singing about as I get one more question. What are you working on next? You have so many projects, editor, a Prairie schooner, a wonderful literary journal. Um, what's up next?
Speaker 3 00:26:55 Oh, um, uh, that's just a scratching. The surface. They know the whole enterprise around African poetry is a big thing. We just want to major with Mellon grant to do some work on archiving, African poetry and, uh, working with, with institutions around the world. Um, and then of course I'm writing my own work and books will be closing out, you know, quickly teaching doing the things that I always do. Yeah. Amazing.
Speaker 2 00:27:20 I wanted to talk to you about teaching. Let's have you back on some day. I really hope we can. I hope you'll join us again. This is, we've been talking with Kwame Dawes, a man of letters, a poet. Um, his latest book of poems is Nebraska. He's the editor of new generation of African poets check book, box sets, and many, many other things. Look him up. Thank you so much, sir. It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 3 00:27:42 Thanks for having me. I enjoyed this. Yeah. Great. Thank you. And now yes, yes. Our bodies
Speaker 4 00:27:56 And we expect medicine as a science to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality. We want our doctors to listen to us and care for us as people, but we also need their assessments of our pain and fevers, aches, and exhaustion to be free of any prejudice about who we are. We expect and deserve fair and ethical treatment regardless of our agenda or the color of our skin. But here things get complicated. Medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. The history of medicine of illness is every bit as social and cultural, as it is scientific. It is a history of people, their bodies and their lives, not just the physicians, surgeons, clinicians, and researchers. A medical progress has not much forward just in laboratories and benches lectures and textbooks. It has always reflected the realities of the changing world and the meanings of being human gender differences, intimately stitched into the fabric of humanness at every stage and its long history.
Speaker 4 00:29:00 Medicine has absorbed and enforced socially constructed. Gender divisions. These divisions have traditionally scribed power and dominance to men. Historically, women have been subordinated in politics, wealth, and education, modern scientific medicine, as it has evolved over the centuries as a profession, an institution, and the discipline has flourished in these exact conditions, male dominance, and with it, the superiority of the male body was cemented into marriage. Medicine's very foundations laid down in ancient Greece and the third century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle described the female body as the inverse, the male with its genitalium turned inside out. Women were marked by their anatomical difference from men and medically defined as faulty effective and efficient. But women also possessed an organ of the highest biological and social value. The uterus possession of this organ defined the purpose of women to bear and raise children knowledge about female biology centered on women's capacity and duty to reproduce being biologically female defined and constrained what it meant to be a woman and being a woman was conflated with and reduced to the female sex medicine has battled dated these social determinants, but constructing the myth that a woman was her biology, that she was ruled by it governed by it at the mercy of it.
Speaker 4 00:30:30 Women's illnesses and diseases were consistently related back to the secrets and curiosities of her reproductive organs, the mystical uterus influence every conceivable disorder and dysfunction of her mind and body and ever since medical knowledge about women's susceptibility to illness and disease has been shaped and distorted by prejudice beliefs that possessing a uterus defines our inferior position in the manmade world.
Speaker 4 00:31:00 All right. Thank you so much. You're listening to right on radio. And that was Eleanor Cleghorne reading from her new book on well women misdiagnoses and myth in a man-made world on our received her PhD in humanities and cultural studies in 2012. And then since then been using her background in feminist history to contribute to the education of others, of her findings and experiences in 2017, she was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo additions essay prize. And since has written creatively about her experiences of having a chronic illness. I'm so excited to be talking to you. I love the book. Um, just talking about you, uh, you are on, on, well woman self identified on well woman. Uh, and you have been dealing with that diagnosis for about 10 years. Yes, yes, that's right. Were you always a writer or do you think that having these experiences, whereas what motivated you to write this book?
Speaker 4 00:31:57 I've always been a writer. So my background is in feminist sort of cultural history. So around the time that I was diagnosed, when I became an unwell woman with the chronic disease called lupus systemic lupus erythematosus or just lupus, as it's most commonly known, I was doing my PhD and I was looking into feminist histories of art, especially around women artists who just didn't receive the attention in some of the more dominant and mainstream histories and cannons. So I already had this sort of impetus to look backwards in order to understand where we were in the present time. And there were so many unanswered questions around my disease. So I was diagnosed and given really excellent care. But what my doctors couldn't tell me was why I got this disease in the first place or why it predominantly affects women, or, you know, might there have been some, you know, relationship to the health of women and my family.
Speaker 4 00:32:55 There were so many unanswered questions around it, even though they were caring for me and they kept me alive. So I just sort of started looking back to try and figure out, you know, okay, how long has this disease existed and why are there so many blind spots still around it? And I sort of began to kind of unpack this sort of fascinating history of unwell women that who were emerging through case studies and clinical reports and all who felt very Kendrick to me, because even though they were unwell in 1902 or in 1894, or in 1955, their symptoms and their journey to being diagnosed and taken seriously just felt so familiar. And it felt like mine. And I thought, okay, so medical science has progressed exponentially over a century. So why are we still grappling with these same questions that physicians in like 1902 were trying to ruminate on like what has happened there?
Speaker 4 00:33:55 And this was really the inspiration for the research that became the book because as the years went on and I became more familiar with what it meant to sort of exist in the world as an unwell person or chronically unwell person. I was noticing that illness, especially in women and marginalized, people was becoming more, much more of a topic of conversation. And it was becoming something where, you know, health disparities were being discussed. Women were talking, speaking out about their experiences and, you know, it made me realize that this was an issue that did have some really deep seated historical roots. So, you know, as I sort of learned as I kind of came into my consciousness, I guess, about how much was this systemic problem? This was my, it, it sort of made me kind of situate myself within this history. And that's what I sort of wanted to do with the book is create a book about illness experience and about the histories of some of these illnesses that helps other people who might experience medical dismissal or struggled to be diagnosed, also see the trait themselves within a history.
Speaker 4 00:35:06 Um, yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Um, in that researching and learning about these other unwell women of the past, was there any one particular that you really related to or identified with, um, or any of the pioneers that you really appreciated their work from? There were so many, uh, unwell women that sort of appeared to me, or like I met, I felt like I met, um, in these case studies and what was so sort of haunting them was that you would get just this tiny fragment of a picture of who these women were. So you might find out an age or maybe in sort of older case studies, a profession or a marital status, but there was nothing about how it actually felt to be them or live in the world at that time in history as them. But there was one in particular whose, who actually didn't make it into the book for the different reasons, but a standalone case of a woman called grace who was 18.
Speaker 4 00:36:07 And she went to the London hospital in 1982 to the dermatology ward and she had skin rashes over her torso and her face. Now leave, this can affect every sort of organ and tissue, including the skin, but lupus primarily before more was understood about it. It was known as a skin disease and she had the kind of characteristic rashes of lupus. So she was admitted eventually to a dermatology ward at the London hospital, but she'd been very sick since her sort of early teens. And maybe before with rheumatic pain, with fevers, with, you know, other rashes that kind of waxed and waned, and she'd never been treated or diagnosed for any of that. And eventually, you know, very, very sadly she died and she had a heart condition should fluid around her, her heart, which was a symptom or a flare that I had actually encountered just before I was diagnosed.
Speaker 4 00:37:07 And I just felt so haunted by this. And she was, there was an autopsy performed on the doctors, posthumously diagnosed her with lupus. And what really struck me about this was that, you know, her experience, what it must've felt like for her, for this sort of fairly ordinary working class, young woman to go through life feeling so unwell and, you know, to be so isolated in that and to be, to be left untreated, but also she then contributed to the knowledge that evolved and saved my life. So there was something really kindred about that and really kind of, yeah, really sort of haunting. Um, so of all the unwell women that I met, I think she was the most one that I felt the most kinship with, um, and intensive physicians. I mean, there were some really incredible and pioneering women physicians who really kind of struggled to enter the medical profession and often did so because they understood how profoundly women patients needed to be able to talk to women doctors.
Speaker 4 00:38:19 Because of course we're talking about, you know, women being officially admitted into the medical profession, not just to practice, but also to be educated and obtain a license. It was late, late 19th century and medical history is extremely long and we're talking like end of the 19th century. And at that time in, you know, in the UK and the USA, the Victorian sensibilities around, you know, what was right, you know, what women were allowed to say about how they felt and about their bodies to doctors and physicians, women physicians, or from really understood that a lot of women's health was going untreated and undiagnosed because women were just too bound up in kind of propriety and fear to really explain how they felt. And even if they did, you know, they were not regarded as an, in any way, reliable narrators of their pain and other symptoms.
Speaker 4 00:39:16 So every time I sort of encountered a really pioneering and inspiring women physician, this was sort of her platform to put it in late Monday, parlance that she said, we need it. Otherwise, this is what we do. We need to kind of level that agenda playing field in medicine. And one of my favorites was a physician called Mary Putnam Jakoby, who was an American physician at the who entered the medical profession at the end of the 19th century around the time when questions about women's rights to be educated to the same level as men. So the secondary school at high school and college were really being brought to the fore. And there were many doctors at the time who were very outspoken about this idea that because a woman is primarily reproductive and that is her, you know, ordained purpose that scholarly activities, or trying to compete with men where all that would lead to is, you know, some sort of horrible disease in her reproductive organs.
Speaker 4 00:40:15 And she'd be left in fertile. And we left a spinster and Noah marry her and eventually society would be destroyed. So, you know, these ideas about female biology being weak and defective and primarily reproductive, but really exploited in order to keep women in their place. Uh, Mary Putnam Jakoby, she rebuffed this sheet by using real research, genuine research in order to ask women themselves what they actually felt like, you know, how their health, especially their menstrual health was affected by going to college by going to work if they weren't working. And she devised some really fantastic prize winning research that disproved that menstruation for example, was an illness. Cause it was like universally regarded as a sickness. And that also proved that women were not, um, their health was not sort of damaged in any way by exercising or studying, but it was in fact, you know, very beneficial to women's health.
Speaker 4 00:41:16 She also say had she rebuffed a lot of theories about hysteria in the 19th century. Um, and she believed that hysteria was mostly a set of symptoms that were caused by the social dissatisfaction that women experienced through having their lives limited to being wives and mothers. And she thought that in order to cure the symptoms of, you know, in a vertical Ms. Hysteria, that women shouldn't be, you know, made to rest and made to like abstain from work and thought and action, but they should actually be encouraged to do that. And they would find meaning and they would find purpose. And that was the way out of these, you know, hysteric and nervous diseases. They weren't, it wasn't the cause it was in fact the cure. So she's was just amazing and she's really, really ardent supporter of women's rights and supporter of women's suffrage.
Speaker 4 00:42:08 So I think, yeah, she's incredibly inspiring. Wonderful. Cool. Um, with the influx of women in the medical industry, do you see, uh, an increase in listening to women as a whole, uh, do you think that the foundation of the bias that has been like implemented over the centuries is still contributing to how women physicians are being taught and how they see women patients? Or do you think that that is improving? Well, I think, you know, anecdotally, from what I see in here, I think that, you know, the best care that I have had for example, has been through women doctors and some of the Mo some of the specialists that I've seen for my condition, you know, in fact, not some, but all of the specialists I've seen over the last 10 years have been women. And I don't think it's a coincidence that women in, uh, have dedicated themselves to these kinds of branches of internal medicine where, you know, historically women have been very let down, not just by things like lack of knowledge or, you know, the privileging of, of male diseases, but also by the sort of attitudes and biases that might get expressed even implicitly or unconsciously from a male in a position of authority towards a woman or a person of a marginalized gender.
Speaker 4 00:43:30 So I do think that that contributes, I think there's not enough research yet to tell whether that, you know, the leveling out like gender equality in the medical profession. Although I think it's definitely a way to strategize against like the prevalence of gender discrimination towards patients. But I think there needs to be more research that shows that because these pro the thing about these biases and prejudices, when they're unconscious, is that they're not, they're often not coming from individual prejudice. Sometimes they're just ingrained into the medical knowledge or they're sort of part of the way that the patient doctor encounter is structured is sort of rigged against women. So, you know, if you go to the doctor's office and you've been suffering from a pain, that's been troubling you, but you can't, you know, you, it's difficult to express or it's, you know, but you know, something's wrong, you have this sense, you know, there's been studies that show that the way that women tend to express their pain verbally tends to be more emotional and more social, more related to their lives.
Speaker 4 00:44:40 And actually that kind of context of expression means that it's negatively impacts women's care because doctors in that moment will assume that something that's narrativized or stories that are told around something takes away from its reality and credibility, which I think is incredible. So for example, if a man and not, and again, not all men, but a male, you know, more masculine attitude towards pay might be, you know, I ha it hurts and it hurts here and it's hurt for three hours. There's more. And I think that that sort of way of expressing and communicating bodily feeling is seen as more legitimate because it focuses solely on the symptom. So you think in a, you know, with a time poor GP as our first port of call to go to a doctor's office, doctor's surgery, you know, we just don't have the time. We don't have the space and we don't have like the dynamics that allow women to space to speak and speak, and also the conditions to be listened to actively.
Speaker 4 00:45:43 And that also contributes, I think, to how much women want to articulate about what's happening in their bodies. So even though those kinds of old 19th century ideas about stigma and shame about speaking up, maybe socially, they're not with us so much. I still think that the patient doctor interaction is not set up to accommodate women speaking freely about what it feels like to be them, because they might anticipate being disbelieved or distrusted or dismissed. So you become, I think self-protective quite often. Absolutely. Um, okay. Last final question. Uh, if you, do you have any advice to any women that are just starting out on this journey of trying to advocate for themselves in the medical industry and the doctor's office really anywhere? Uh, what would your advice be? I think my first piece of advice would be to know that if you do encounter dismissal or you feel like you're being invalidated, that none of that is your fault.
Speaker 4 00:46:42 And not often it's the result of systemic discrepancies and biases that are in no way, you know, if you experienced these kinds of difficulties, it's, don't internalize that as being your fault because it isn't, and you have every right to attain good health and to be listened to. And, you know, the, there are practical things I think we can do. Like if you, you know, good to take, for example, maybe it's symptoms diary, if you don't feel so confident being, you know, pushing for better care, you might want to like, say, look, I've, you know, recorded my symptoms over the last three months or something. I think another really great thing to do is if you feel that the doctor's office situation is you can take someone that you really trust someone who can bear witness tours happening in that room, who doesn't need to speak for you, but can just be there.
Speaker 4 00:47:38 Who sees you, who hears you, and also maybe who can listen with a bit of an objective ear. So it can be really difficult when you're ill and in pain, especially when you feel you're being ignored to, you know, be clear and on emotional. And unfortunately, you know, this is sometimes we have to game the system a tiny bit, but I feel like if we have someone with us who we really trust, it can also, you know, there are some fantastic and incredible communities that have emerged over the last few years, especially on things and, uh, platforms like Instagram, where you can connect with other women, other people who are going through what you're going through. And I think the chronic illness community and the owners collective community, there's so much strength in that. So much strength in realizing that none of it's your fault and you're also not alone. And that's, I think something that I find really, really hopeful because there's real power in creating community and it can be, you know, really change-making. Okay. Wonderful. Amazing. Thank you so much for the advice and for taking the time to talk to me today, uh, you are listening to right on radio and now that's,
