A doctor in Psychiatry, Kate Womersley writes about medicine, gender and women’s health. She reviews books too.

Kate’s research aims to improve sex and gender equity in biomedical research, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

She lives in Edinburgh.

Writing

Review: Sick of It

The Observer - July 2024

The new Labour government is busy looking for ways to depart from the Conservatives’ legacy. One target may well be the 2022 women’s health strategy for England, an underfunded package of insufficient medical offerings that sidestepped important questions about inclusivity and narrowly constrained women’s health to conditions affecting the uterus, ovaries and breasts.…(read more)

 

Review: Strange Bodies

The Lancet - July 2024

The bleep for obstetric emergencies buzzes and then screeches in my pocket. Haemorrhage. I am soon in a peloton of doctors and midwives rushing out of wards and clinic rooms. At the bedside there are too many of us, and the patient is obscured behind a circle of blue scrubs. Awaiting instructions from the consultant, I glance over to the corner..…(read more)

 

Review: Coming of Age

The Guardian - June 2024

I had just emerged from my own teenage years when I first read Joan Didion’s essay On Keeping a Notebook. Two sentences earned a mark in pen: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”…(read more)

The doctor who taught me about human reproduction at medical school was in fact a veterinarian. More is known about a sheep’s rhythms than a woman’s, he said, setting the tone in our first tutorial, presumably because ewes drive a healthy profit. I was disappointed. I felt that menstruation and pregnancy shouldn’t be narrated to us like they would be for any other animal…(read more)

 

‘Of course I support the NHS. Everybody supports the NHS, or says they do,’ poked the comedian Frankie Boyle in one of the many campaigns promoting the health service. To admit you don’t believe in this national institution is as taboo as not caring about Britishness, about goodness, about people.…(read more)

 

Review: The Country of the Blind

The Guardian - July 2023

Medics thrive on feeling useful: testing abnormalities, forming a differential diagnosis, providing treatment and tracking improvement. But for many conditions, the story is one of uncertainty, setback and management rather than cure. While clinicians busy themselves with visible and measurable signs of disease, the patient’s hopes, despair and wavering sense of self may go untended, leaving them with the feeling that they are descending into darkness alone…(read more)

How much does Britain still ‘love’ the NHS?

The Spectator - September 2023

‘Of course I support the NHS. Everybody supports the NHS, or says they do,’ poked the comedian Frankie Boyle in one of the many campaigns promoting the health service. To admit you don’t believe in this national institution is as taboo as not caring about Britishness, about goodness, about people.…(read more)

 

On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to me as a barcode. The tiny world beneath my lens created an illusion of human supremacy, a world where the truth was small, immobilised and bored of itself…(read more)

 

Pregancy’s best kept secret

The Guardian - April 2022

My “morning sickness” started in the evening. That was the first clue the antenatal guides and obstetric textbooks were not telling women the whole truth. When the nausea lasted all day, and then for 245 days, that was the second clue. If I’d known then that I would feel sick until my baby was born, I’m not sure I would have braved pregnancy at all…(read more)

On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to me as a barcode.…(read more)

 

When Ray Bradbury was asked if his dystopian vision in Fahrenheit 451 would become a reality, he replied: ‘I don’t try to predict the future. All I want to do is prevent it.’ In the hot embers of the Covid-19 pandemic, it may not be enough to foresee infectious disease threats if we lack the ability to forestall them. After all, predictions were made about 2019…(read more)

 

Review: This Mortal Coil

Financial Times - March 2022

Humans were once granted three decades or so on earth before shuffling off. But for the past quarter of a millennium, we’ve been living ever longer. Today, 30 is the age when rehearsal stops and serious life begins, but — historically speaking — we’re in extra time. Since the early 1800s in western Europe, for each day that passes, life expectancy increases by another five hours….(read more)

Review: Rationality

The Spectator - November 2021

In the 1964 film My Fair Lady after Colonel Pickering has secured the help of an old friend to pull strings at the Home Office (plus ça change) in the hope of finding the absconded Eliza Doolittle, Professor Higgins snaps:

“Why is thinking something women never do?

And why is logic never even tried?

Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.

Why don’t they straighten up the mess that’s inside?

 

After her objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in July, Eilidh Wilcockson, a third year medical student at Newcastle University, received some surprising feedback: not about her clinical knowledge or examination technique, but about what she was wearing. She had been given a “professionalism yellow card,” which is normally used to report violations of confidentiality, offensive language, or causing patient discomfort. In this case it was for the student’s “short dress with no leg coverings.” The “role player commented immediately after the station that it looked unprofessional,” the notes on the card allegedly said. The examiner had added, “I agree.”(read more)

 

At 11:58 p.m. this past June 25, Helen Taylor gave birth to her first baby, a boy, at West Suffolk Hospital in the east of England. At 11:59 p.m., with 15 seconds to spare before midnight, his sister was born. The obstetrician and her team were pleased; the cesarean section was going smoothly, fulfilling Helen’s wish that her twins share a birthday….(read more)

Research

Kate Womersley is a Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health (TGI) and Imperial College London. Her current work with TGI is focused on the co-creation and implementation of sex and gender policies for the UK’s biomedical, health and care research funders. This is part of a wider initiative, supported by the Wellcome Trust, to recognise diversity among patients, and ensure research practices and outcomes represent everyone in our society.

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