Lucile Ferreux: What History Teaches Us About the Place of Human Health
Lucile Ferreux, Medical Director at Cesar Fertility, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“What history teaches us about the place of human health in 2 key stages.
– Fundamental paradox of the twentieth century:
The male body has served as a universal standard in general biomedical research. At the time, the majority of medical data and scientific studies were produced from middle-aged Caucasian men
while being largely excluded when it came to reproduction.
Conversely, the female body has been studied mainly from a reproductive perspective.
This gender asymmetry has produced a major blind spot:
little is known about the impact of human health, behaviours or environmental exposures on the reproduction and health of subsequent generations.
– In addition, at the end of the nineteenth century, the first attempt at a specialty dedicated to male reproduction failed: andrology.
At the time, male reproductive health was closely associated with venereal diseases (syphilis, gonorrhea), which were highly stigmatized because they were linked to ‘immoral’ sexuality.
Doctors who devoted themselves to it were ridiculed in medical journals.
To last, they shifted their field of expertise to the urinary tract: andrology disappeared, urology was structured.
As a result, for decades, no unified medical infrastructure (journals, learned societies, congresses) has made it possible to accumulate, structure and disseminate knowledge on male reproductive health.
A real non-knowledge produced, with lasting consequences.
This analysis is developed by sociologist Cynthia R. Daniels in her seminal work Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction.
In it, she shows how norms of masculinity have shaped, and limited, scientific production on male reproduction.
More recent works, notably those of René Almeling and Lisa Campo-Engelstein, underline that this invisibilization still persists today in research, public health and the media.
Fully integrating men into reproductive health is not a matter of fashion.
It is a scientific, ethical and public health issue, essential to better understand human reproduction as a whole.
Sources:
– Daniels CR. Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction. Oxford University Press, 2006.
– Almeling R. GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health. University of California Press, 2020.
– Campo-Engelstein L. Bioethics work on reproductive health equity.”
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