This Won't Hurt: How Medicine Fails Women

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Women: your pelvic parts have been branded by men. There, you’ll find the names of long-dead male anatomists – like Gabriel Falloppio of fallopian tube fame, James Douglas, whose eponymous pouch lies behind the uterus, and Caspar Bartholin, whose name endures in glands by the labia. It’s a land grab reminiscent of men who planted flags on mountains climbed and lands conquered. This patriarchal history, though, seems, well, historical. With other eponyms consigned to dusty textbooks, and women medical school entrants outnumbering men, hasn’t change finally emerged? She is balanced in her evidence analysis, forensic in her research. There’s a striking silence here, though: an absence of women who have been patients themselves. No interviews on hospital wards, not even Zoom calls with those enduring chronic illness. For a book that points to “the power of listening to women”, this compounds their invisibility. Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, "Seeing Red": Terrance says to Mac before beating him up "This will only hurt for a second." The line becomes a Running Gag throughout the episode, and at the end is given an Ironic Echo by Bloo: "Don't worry, it'll only hurt for a week." For good or ill, we’ve come a long way since ER. When it aired in 1994, it was the first mainstream global hit to depict the medical profession with any degree of realism. Though it still had George Clooney as the hospital paediatrician so, y’know, it wasn’t literal warts and all, that’s for sure. Over in the UK, launching in the same year, but with inevitably more local – though still heartfelt – acclaim we had Cardiac Arrest. That was all warts, sliced off by the writer and former NHS doctor Jed Mercurio and placed under a brutally unforgiving microscope. He followed that up 10 years later with Bodies, a full dissection of the people, players and power structures that simultaneously support and destroy what could be the best health system in the world, adapted from his own autobiographical novel of the same name.

Doc McStuffins: The whole clinic staff uttered this exact phrase to an uneasy Niles while trying to get his bandages off. Of course, Niles was expecting it to hurt. Inverted in that they proceeded to carefully take off most of the bandages while Niles wasn't paying attention, so he naturally felt nothing when Doc told him it was time to take them off and pulled a little piece of bandage still on him. This is intensified by bias that characterises women as overly anxious. One 39-year-old (not mentioned by Bigg) told The Brain Tumour Charity she was repeatedly sent away with “antidepressants, sleep charts”, etc: “One of the GPs I saw actually made fun of me, saying what did I think my headaches were, a brain tumour?” N°1 in Artemis Fowl mentions that one of his spells "might hurt a bit". Holly, who is about to receive said spell, immediately lampshades the trope to herself. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

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The Murderbot Diaries. In Network Effect, Murderbot has to smash a computer containing two friendly AI's to destroy TargetControlSystem. The computer is shut down so Murderbot tells itself that they won't feel anything, while regretting that TargetControlSystem won't be conscious to feel it either. Beautifully averted in Hook, where Hook is about to pierce Peter's son's ear and tells him 'Brace yourself, lad, because this is REALLY going to hurt.' Zurg: [as the noise of the operating machine reaches a peak] Did I mention the operation will be excruciatingly painful? In Cube Zero, the Cube surgeon at the end falsely assures Wynn that he won't feel anything of the lobotomy they're going to give him. The first thing Wynn does when they cut into his brain is to scream out in terror.

In Ender's Game, Ender is told "it won't hurt a bit" to have his monitor taken out, but Ender knows that adults say that when it is going to hurt. Inverted in Creepshow, when Jordy Verrill dreams of what will happen if he goes to the doctor about the growth on his fingers. The doctor tells him the fingers will have to come off, then opens up a steam sterilizer and takes out a meat cleaver. "This is going to be extremely painful, Mr. Verrill," he says. Julia Garner as Anna Delvey, left, and Anna Chlumsky as Vivian Kent in the ‘droningly repetitive’ Inventing Anna. Photograph: Nicole Rivelli/Netflix Carrigan Crittenden: [stalking after Dibs, carrying a huge battle axe] Damn it, Dibs! This won't hurt a bit!When someone does something painful to someone else for any reason, they sometimes tell them that it won't hurt at all. This often turns out to be a blatant lie. Those weren't exactly his last words - he lived for four more days after writing them and then, in his 'fortified compound' at Owl Farm, Woody Creek, Colorado, shot himself in the head. The Discworld novel Men at Arms has the troll retrophrenologist truthfully informing his client "This won't hurt a bit" as he readies the mallet. (Phrenology being the pseudo-science based on determining a person's mental state and personality by measuring the skull and variations thereof. Retrophrenology "works" by introducing new variations to the skull to modify said mental state and personality...)