I experienced a moment of extreme emptiness,” recalls Dr Marieke Bigg of her moment of realisation at the gynaecologist. “It came from the gaping void in my vocabulary. It came from my sense of utter disconnection from the process unfolding at the other end of the inspection table. It came from not knowing what was wrong with me. From not even knowing what my doctor was looking for.”
Her diagnosis? Medically speaking, pretty inadequate (“Might be endometriosis, he suggested, and casually offered me keyhole surgery”). But Bigg, a 30 year-old sociologist, has used her experience — one that will unfortunately be familiar to many women — to write a ground-breaking new book, This Won’t Hurt, about the medical sexism and gaslighting that women experience every single day.
