The History of Anatomy - pale male and stale?

“Bodies are bloody and fleshy and messy — and that’s exactly why I love them.”— Gabriel Weston

Our latest Altered State conversation took us beneath the surface, literally, with two doctors who each began in the humanities and ended up probing the border between flesh and feeling.

Surgeon and writer Gabriel Weston started out studying English and philosophy before retraining as a doctor. Professor Gene Feder OBE, a GP turned public-health researcher, began in biology and philosophy before clinical depression, recovery and community work reshaped his path. Together, they explored what lies beneath the skin — the point where biology meets belief.

Gabriel’s new book Alive: An Alternative Anatomy grew from a revelation: “The more I looked at how we’re taught the body, the less sense it made.” She traced how female anatomy — and especially the clitoris — was “actively deleted from the record” in the 19th and 20th centuries, despite richer detail in earlier texts. Only the latest edition of Gray’s Anatomy finally restores it.

“What you learn in a dissection - what you label - is a value judgement.”

Gene described bias built into the very “engine of medical science.” Clinical trials excluded women, older people and ethnic minorities, hard-wiring inequality into evidence itself.

“The normal is the male presentation,” he said. “Even what’s abnormal is what’s abnormal for men.”

Gabriel added that women are twice as likely to die of heart disease as of breast cancer — largely because their symptoms, that often start in the gut, are still dismissed as “atypical.” Both speakers agreed that perception itself is conditioned. Gene recalled being trained to diagnose every skin disease on white skin:

“For centuries, the normal skin was white skin.”

Gabriel linked this to theatre and philosophy: how diagrams pre-determine what a surgeon sees. “If we went in without pre-existing images,” she said, “we’d see differently.”

For the evening’s Toolbox, each guest offered a takeaway.Gene chose Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal, a reminder that trauma lives in the body.Gabriel offered something simpler:

“A blindfold — so that girls and women stop thinking about how they look, and start noticing how they feel.”r centuries, the normal skin was white skin.”

As the room exhaled, the message lingered: medicine will only truly heal when it remembers that doctors and patients share the same body, the same fears, the same skin.

Our playlist for the evening pretty much wrote itself...

Stayin Alive- The Bee Gees

Doctor Robert – The Beatles

(Don’t Fear) The Reaper – Blue Oyster Cult

Night Nurse – Gregory Isaacs

I Wanna Be Sedated – Ramones

Spirit in the Sky – Doctor & The Medics

Lust For Life – Iggy Pop

Shake the Disease – Depeche Mode

 Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan