“Lady doctor”

I started watching Bramwell last night on the netflix. It’s a British TV series from 1995-98.

It’s about a woman who is a doctor and the difficulties she faces as a woman and due to her attempts to help the poor in late Victorian England.

Jemma Redgrave as Dr. Eleanor Bramwell

The first episode kept reminding me of the recent Michigan “Vagina” controversy that I wrote about yesterday and several days ago.

There are these older, white, male establishment doctors who keep performing ovariectomies on women for various conditions such as “female hysteria” (a very common diagnoses in that time) and refusing to discuss a diagnosis of syphilis because it’s improper, especially for a woman to discuss.  

After Dr. Bramwell challenges all this, she gets kicked out of the hospital, banned from working in its wards.

Sounds ridiculously familiar. When watching this sort of thing in a TV show, it’s obviously wrong and stupid and pig-headed and blind. Perhaps the Republican leaders in the Michigan State House should watch it. But that may be unlikely, as it’s the sort of liberal “claptrap” they show in other countries, or maybe on PBS.

I don’t expect there to be any nakedness in this series, but it relates to other stuff I’ve written about, so...why not, eh?

Anyway, here’s what I have to say to late Victorian England: Vagina, vagina, vagina!

Oh wait, no... HERE’S what I have to say to late Victorian England: Let that “lady doctor” do her thing. She’s right. You’re not.