“When Women Couldn’t Be Examined: Chinese Female Patients Once Pointed to Ivory Dolls for Diagnosis”
Summary & Historical Context For many centuries in China, women seeking medical attention faced strict cultural constraints. Under the influence of Confucian gender norms, direct physical examination of a woman’s body by a male physician was often socially unacceptable. To work around this barrier, some physicians kept a small carved figure — typically of a…

