The medical origins of a gender stigma: the underestimation of women’s pain

Abstract

In Euro-Western medicine, pain is a concept that changes over time, absorbing knowledge and understanding from different eras and historical contexts. Therefore, transcending objectivity, pain takes on a central role regarding individual experiences, making any attempt at reification quite fleeting. Consequently, the goal of this study is not to define the history of pain but rather to examine how ancient medical views on pain, from Hippocrates to the Platonic-Aristotelian model, shaped Euro-Western medical language concerning pain. Through a medical focus on the body, this study illustrates how pain contributed to the social construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as key aspects of medical discourse and how pain is portrayed.