Today is the 142nd birthday of an amazing Canadian researcher and physician– Dr. Maude Abbott. It’s hard to sum up in a few words just how awesome this lady was. Briefly, she was orphaned as a child and was raised by her grandmother. After graduating high school, she joined one of the first groups of women to enroll and graduate from McGill. Although she was tremendously interested in pursuing medicine, she was not admitted to the McGill medical school which at the time was exclusive to men. So instead, she enrolled in Bishop’s where women were admitted, and later pursued her postgraduate studies in Europe.

When Abbott returned to Montreal, as I outline below, she was able to establish herself as an expert in congenital heart disease. For her work she was awarded an honourary medical degree from McGill and became a professor at the very institution that had some three decades earlier refused to consider her application on the basis of her gender. Being a woman researcher and physician, Abbott faced many challenges in a world where science and medicine were considered to be men’s territory. However, she overcame many of these barriers by the excellence in the quality of her work and her strong character, consequently paving the way for many more women to succeed.

The following is not an autobiographical sketch, but rather looks at a particular artifact of medicine that I had the pleasure of seeing at the McGill Medical Museum earlier this year and how it shaped Maude Abbott’s career.

The Holmes Heart
Rise of Pathological Anatomy in Canada

By Marzieh Ghiasi (Mar 2011)

athological anatomy, the study of altered or abnormal anatomy, is a field that in its early stages relied heavily on the collection and study of specimens. The ‘Holmes Heart’ is one of such specimens. Stored today at the McGill Medical Museum, it gave early modern physicians an understanding of the human body and its pathologies.
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Preamble

I intended to make this post on the eve of the new decade over a year and half ago, but at the time I opted to make an ode to the decade instead. March 8th, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the first International Women’s Day– and I thought, what would be more perfect than starting then to write in regular intervals about women who have inspired me (and countless other young women). This entries be posted under the tag: “women who inspire“.

Introduction

One of the earliest memories I have is that of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on a television news programme, and my mother in the background remarking, “look she’s so strong and brilliant—you can be like her”. My mother herself grew up in the violence of the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, where she saw the rights and representation of women erode day by day. So she wanted me, her daughter, to live in a world where there were no frontiers. A world where I was equal, and could aspire and become anything I wanted to be.

In time, however, I realized that world was not a reality. That, in fact, I lived a world deeply divided along the fault lines of gender. A world where women constitute 60% of the world’s poorest, living on less than $1 a day. A world where women make up make up two-thirds of the illiterate, and less than 16% of the world’s parliamentarians. ¹ A world where women produce 60-80 percent of the food supply, receive 10 percent of the income, and own less than 1 percent of the means of production.² A world women are subject to slurs and violence inside and outside their homes, in times of peace and war, by strangers and those close to them. Women’s basic human rights are brought to legislature, their judgement is questioned, and their choices are restricted. And even as gains are made, even as gaps of gender close, society still presents its false dichotomy: To be a woman is to be weak, to be a man is to be strong. But how could this be, when some of the strongest people I’ve known in my life are women?

In the decade I came of age, from a child to a young women, I looked for women who transcended these dichotomies and who could shine a light on my path. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far. From Manila to Tehran to Montreal—daughters, sisters, mothers, activists, scientists, artists, parliamentarians, teachers, writers… They are everywhere and they are courageous and strong. We are strong.

As posted in Neglected Tropical Diseases Society

Science Daily reports of a recent study in the PLoS showing that almost 7 million pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with hookworms and at risk for anemia. According to the study, completed through systemic investigation of literature, 37.7 million women in the region, and millions more in Asia and South America, remain infected with hookworms due to poor antihelminthic treatment options.

The research corroborates a strong link between blood loss due to intestinal hookworm infections and low hemoglobin levels. Anemia can lead to poor health conditions in mothers and maternal death and can slow fetal growth and development, leading to low birth-weight which is associated with infant morality.

Commenting on the impact of this study, the leading author, Simon Brooker of KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Collaborative Programme in Nairobi, Kenya told SciDev “We hope this will prompt the WHO, international agencies and national governments to further consider deworming in maternal health packages”.

After seven years of reading absurd newsreports and bad reporting, three relatively short sentences in a caption of a set of images “Unseen Iran” ticked me off. Here’s the byproduct which I happily forwarded not two minutes ago to those responsible– hopefully I won’t groan about this five days from now. Meh.

Picture Stories ( ss_060302_iran ) a systematic problem?

Dear sir or madam,

I just wanted to inform you that as a regular subscriber to your news, recently I have noticed a marked degradation in the quality of the reporting on your site. This is specially pertaining to stories that I have read on Iran which seem infused with not only bias but factual inaccuracies, poor research, and poor narration, qualities which I would expect a reputed source such as yourself would not ascribe to.

A few minutes ago I stumbled upon the following infuriating caption in one of your pictures “Iranian girls celebrate after winning a softball game in Tehran in March 2005. Softball is relatively new sport in Iran and has become extremely popular with young women. Women rarely play sports because of difficulties presented by the hijab, or veil, they wear. Women are banned from attending many men’s sporting events.”

Reading this I could not help but contemplate whether the writer and/or editor who has chosen to plant this caption beside the image has the slightest idea about the condition of women in Iran, or whether they malevolently and willfully chose to spread ignorance and blatant misinformation.

For one, softball is NOT a relatively new sport in Iran, certainly it has not enjoyed as much popularity among Iranian young women such as games like volleyball, basketball and football (soccer) in the past two decades, however in terms of a sport, and it certainly has existed and has been well-played. Iranian sports and Iranian culture has not been as ‘isolated’ from a global influence as the wording in this caption and others on the site seems to suggest. Secondly, your claims that women are banned from attending “many men’s sporting events” are questionable at best. As I recall, and a short Google search reveals, other western news media sources have reported that there have been reports of women beings prohibited from attending certain games in Iran’s national/international football (soccer) arenas, however, reports also follow-up with recent reversals or speculated reversals on these discriminatory policies. Meanwhile, the fact stands that though not all, women freely attend many national sporting events. It seems however that your agency deems it necessary to propagate outdated, questionable and partial information as completely valid…

What I found most infuriating, perhaps, is the comment on the ‘fact’ that women in Iran “rarely play sports” due to difficulties presented by the hijab. Your statement is disputed by even the most basic statistics coming out of Iran. In Iran women are extremely active in the arenas of sports and academics, with national medals and top honors in rallying (equivalent in popularity to the NASCAR sports event in the United States) and many other sports being awarded to women. In academics, considering the fact that today in higher education women in Iran hold a portion larger than 50% of the populace of students in natural sciences and engineering, with a significant portion of women in professorship and tenure positions compared to the West, I would even say that in some respects Iranian women are faring better than their Western counterparts. Women do play sports in Iran, at prestigious and competitive levels as opposed to what your ‘enlightened’ writer has suggested. As with many other women in the Muslim world, some mandated by their personal choice and others by governmental policy, Iranian women wear the hijab, consisting of a head covering, as well as non-revealing clothing in tournaments and competitions. However, in contrast to what your writer has suggested to readers (who unfortunately may not know better) Iranian women take part in sports rather than “rarely play sports” and actively take part and hold prestigious positions in other activities within Iranian society ranging from academia to politics to the arts.

I hope that in the future your agency chooses a more responsible and factual approach to reporting because I sincerely doubt that I am the only individual left dissatisfied and disappointed. Until then, you have lost the trust of this single reader.