The Credo
Why I am beginning to find it insufferable to read current publications in the social sciences
This Christmas, a well-meaning relative gifted me a paperback of Elinor Cleghorn's book Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2022). Since in a different lifetime I used to lecture on the history of pre-modern medicine, I thought I'd give it a go. I have just finished struggling through to the last page, because I'm a determined if not sheer bloody-minded sort of person who prides herself on never giving up on a book once started, regardless of how boring annoying, or plain dreadful - in fact, I proudly believe in my lifetime I have only ever put down three completely unreadable novels, one of which was a sub-Ellis Peters type of historical detective story, again the present of a well-meaning relative who thought that because I do medieval history I must be interested in late-twentieth century medievalist whodunnits ...
But I digress. I have a stonking tension headache today which prevents me from yet again working on the longer piece I keep meaning to type for you, my valued subscribers, so I am penning this short interlude here to keep things going.
Let me jump straight in: reading Cleghorn's book has been one of the most frustrating and headache-inducing experiences of my scholarly life. Yes, I'll go right ahead and blame my tension headache on the mental effort of trying to give benefit of the doubt to this infuriating outpouring of right-on, politically-correct, up-to-the-minute intersectionalist, anti-racist, gender-affirmative but balancingly (pseudo-) feminist affirmation of -ismic justice.
The benefit side comes from the fact that even Cleghorn, despite all the Critical Social Justice drivel, has to quote from sources and underpin her argument by citations from historical texts. The assemblage of source material is actually quite good, and I admit that I learnt a fair bit about women's interaction with medicine from the early modern period onwards to contemporary times. I'm a medievalist, specialising (at least used to) in medieval medical history, so obviously there is not a lot of new stuff a general history of women and medicine can tell me about medieval times. Indeed, I do not even expect as much, since medieval sources are, despite what all the equity-warriors clamouring for 'decolonisation of the curriculum' are shouting from the depths of the Special Collections branches of their august university libraries, not exactly accessible to most modern folk. You need to have at least a smattering of Latin, since the bulk of material even if edited and therefore in modern print form is not translated into English, and if you do your entire research based on what's available via Dr Google, good luck to you, since hardly any of this material is digitised yet (and probably never will be now, since the Middle Ages are too 'problematic' for your average 'woke' ideologist). So no, I did not expect Cleghorn to devote more than one-and-a-half chapters to ancient and medieval medicine, hence I'll be fair and not judge this against her. And the remaining sixteen-and-half chapters did give me a pretty good insight into the more modern period of medicine that I am not so well versed in.
No, the infuriating and frustrating side of reading Cleghorn's book stems from the fact that rather than being a piece of historical research, this is one single, 478-pages-long confession of orthodox belief - a credo. The Credo (from Latin 'I believe') is the recitation during Mass of the Nicene creed, what the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains as:
“Whoever says ‘I believe’ says ‘I pledge myself to what I believe.’ Communion in faith needs a common language of faith, normative for all and uniting all in the same confession of faith.”
The credo is the both the mission-statement of the believer and the litmus-test for active demonstration of 'true belief'. Cleghorn literally says as much, for instance when she writes: "Of course [my emphasis], not all women have uteruses, and not all people who have uteruses, or who menstruate, are women." (p. 2). Such biological gender-nonsense affirms the credo of 'wokedom'. The book is littered copiously with all the right terminology and phrases. Examples from just the preface and the introduction include: her attempt to uncover "medicine's systemic and structural injustices" (p. xv); her desire for an "equitable medical future" (p. xix); and the constant reference to "other ethnically diverse women" (p. 5) tagged onto each and every mention of, presumably, non-white, black or Asian women. No opportunity is left out to employ these stock phrases, most of the time completely anachronistically. But then judging the past by the standards of the present is the hallmark of (Un)Critical Social Justice. This is not historical research, but the woke equivalent of painting by numbers. Where you have to paint 'green' at shapes numbered '3', this sort of writing is a cobbled together by word-generator: when triggered by something incomprehensingly unmodern and historic, insert appropriate slogan such as "systemic" or "structural". This signals to the fund-giver, peer-reviewer and lastly reader that you are one of "us" and by your credo worthy of publication. Sorry, but please don't inflict such polemic drivel on me again please.
You are too strict on yourself. I put down a book whenever I get the first whiff of wokeness. I hate novels on homosexual love, I hate drivel about teenagers who all of a sudden become unsure about whatever it is they find in their underpants and I begrudge writers their pen and ink who seem fit to write about Victimhood, in general. These books go into the trashcan with one firm flick of the wrist. (Of course my decision to do so became much easier when I stopped paying for books, by way of downloading them for free from Anna's Archive. https://annas-archive.org)
I admire and pity you for wading through almost 500 pages of that crap. This sort of writing is typical of the squishier fields of study, and is even infiltrating the harder sciences, because including some reference to woke subjects is almost a guarantee of being published.
Which is why I love the spoof papers that managed to get published, such as https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/hoax-papers-the-shoddy-absurd-and-unethical-side-of-academia-1.3655500