| abstract |
This dissertation examines medical gaslighting, which is the invalidation, minimization, and psychologization of patients' health concerns by healthcare providers, with particular attention to its disproportionate impact on women. Drawing on a dual-methodological approach that combines theoretical scholarship with qualitative analysis of first-person memoirs, this study explores the ways that medical gaslighting both reflects and extends upon, as well as complicates, existing conceptualizations of gaslighting and the ways in which structural power imbalances within clinical settings can cause epistemic harm regardless of practitioner intent.
The theoretical basis draws on the works of key scholars such as Elizabeth Barnes, Kate Abramson, Andrew Spear, Miranda Fricker, and Rachel McKinnon, illuminating gaslighting as a phenomenon that operates interpersonally, epistemically, and structurally. This framework is situated in a historical analysis of patriarchal influences on medicine from the Hippocratic Corpus, to the persistence of hysteria and misogynistic clinical norms, to shed light on the gendered dynamics of contemporary medical practice.
Three memoirs are thematically analyzed: Sarah Ramey's The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, Lisa Lynch's The C-Word and Porochista Khakpour's Sick. Three interlinked findings are made: the systemic neglect of women's pain, the erasure of women's medical narratives through testimonial injustice and the internalization of gaslighting as self-blame and epistemic abuse. Together, these stories reveal medical gaslighting not as an individual aberration but as a structural pattern, sustained by institutionalized gender bias and the devaluation of women's bodily knowledge.
The conclusion of the dissertation is that meaningful reform of medical gaslighting requires understanding it as a systemic epistemic harm situated in the architecture of medical authority and gendered power. The conclusion calls for structural remedies, not just individual education, to combat medical gaslighting.
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