"'You Don't Look Sick': The Impact on and Advocacy of Women with Rheumatoid Arthritis in Twentieth-Century America"

Simone Caron, Wake Forest University

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects approximately one percent of the United States population. Many studies have been done to determine the causes of RA from environmental factors, to dietary impacts, occupational risks, and genetics. This paper is less concerned with the etiology of RA than the disabilization it brought to patients. Women were and continue to be two to three times more likely to develop RA than men, yet there are virtually no historical studies about how women dealt with the debilitating progression of RA on their daily lives. This paper seeks to fill this historical void by asking several questions. When did clinicians first notice the disproportionate number of women suffering with RA? Did women come to the attention of clinicians because women were more likely to seek medical treatment or encounter physicians through childbirth? Was there a connection to women’s diagnosis and the women’s health collective movement of the 1970s? Did clinicians take women’s pain seriously prior to sophisticated blood and genetic testing that confirmed RA in patients? What impact did increased technology such as OXO and other kitchen/household gadgets have on women’s daily lives as they struggled with the debilitating pain and abnormal joint morphology that made everyday tasks difficult? Did this increased technology allow women to live independently longer than in previous decades? What role did the increasingly powerful pharmaceutical industry play? Many rheumatologists hailed the introduction of biologics in the early twenty-first century as the breakthrough treatment for RA, yet forty percent of patients have not benefitted from this new “magic bullet.” In sum, this paper examines the history of women diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, the unique challenges they faced such as medical dismissiveness and societal stigma, and the important role they played in advocating for better treatment and awareness.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 159. Disparities in Recent Technological Health Advancements