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Why Cardiovascular Treatment Lagged for Women

April 18, 2024

What: An excerpt from Dr. Elizabeth Comen’s recent book, All in Her Head, exploring the history of medicine and women’s bodies. This section focuses on how cardiovascular care for women was nonexistent for decades, starting with Wiliam Osler, the physician who in 1889 created the residency model still in use today. But Osler is also responsible for the fact that “cardiac medicine was designed with a male patient in mind, while women presenting with heart complaints were understood to be suffering from neurosis, anxiety, or hysteria.”

Why it matters: As Comen writes: “Today, fully one-third of women will develop heart disease at some point in their lives; for one woman in five, it will be the thing that kills her. That’s not just more than breast cancer; it’s more than all cancers, of every type, combined. A hundred years after William Osler declared that women’s heart failure is all in their heads, it is their leading cause of death: all too real, and all too often overlooked until it’s too late.”

Source: Harvard Gazette

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