When it comes to science and medicine, men (and gods) have left their mark all over the place. They have stamped their names on thousands of creatures, from salmonella bacteria (after US veterinarian Daniel Elmer Salmon, though it was actually his assistant’s discovery) to the endangered grevy zebra (named after a former French president).

After all, until the last century, women were almost excluded from academic medicine. But the continued use of these mostly male eponyms not only reflects the gender bias in our medical knowledge base. It may continue to perpetuate it.

The controversial question of whether language shapes thought has long been debated. Still, plenty of examples exist where describing something in a certain way changes our perception of it. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, professor of linguistics and endangered languages at the University of Adelaide, points out that in languages where the word for ‘bridge’ has a feminine gender, people describe bridges as elegant. But in languages where the word for ‘bridge’ has a masculine gender, people refer to bridges as sturdy.

It raises the question of whether our perceptions of the body, and its conditions, are also skewed by gender biases without us realising.

Gendered jargon

We are all familiar with the term ‘hysteria’ – derived from the Greek word for uterus, ‘hysterika’, and coined by Hippocrates (another dude) to characterise illness caused by ‘movement of the uterus’. The first mental disorder attributed to women, the idea of hysteria dated all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, who first described it in 1900 BC. But it was the Greeks who argued that the uterus was particularly prone to ‘wandering’ (as well as producing ‘toxic fumes’) when it was unfruitful. Getting married, therefore, was the cure. The idea persisted through the centuries: in the 19th Century it became a go-to diagnosis amongst a male-driven medical profession. ‘Hysterical ladies’ began filling doctors’ waiting rooms, lining up for the 'cure' of physician-assisted genital massage to induce ‘paroxysms’ – a polite term for orgasms. The doctors began to suffer from chronic hand cramps and fatigue, making the mechanical vibrator, when it was invented, a welcome relief.

But hysteria – which was finally removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of modern diseases in 1952 – seems relatively archaic today.

Less discussed is how much of the rest of the language of medicine remains draped with patriarchal terms.