Consented:

Medical Rape Culture and What We Can Do About It

If you are a woman, someone who lives with chronic illnesses, someone who has a diverse body, or someone from a marginalized community, chances are, you have felt disempowered by how healthcare was delivered to you. You might even have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, or gaslit. What’s wrong with medicine? You ask silently. You could feel it, but you couldn’t name it.

Consented is a book project that seeks to diagnose medicine’s illness. By defining an encompassing new term — medical rape culture — it provides a doctor’s examination of the current culture of medicine through the scopes of history, modern-day practices, and personal narratives. Interlaced with true patient stories and Zed’s own journey to becoming a true patient advocate, each chapter names a common medical rape culture tactic and reveals its disguise in history and every exam room today.

Unlike rape, medical rape culture is not a crime, nor is it the conscious doing of any individual. And both patients and clinicians are victims of it. It is a pervasive and insidious medical environment that trivializes and normalizes the denial of patients’ bodily autonomy. It shares common grounds with homophobia, racism, and sexism.

Some hallmark symptoms include 1) bad treatment consent, 2) patient blaming/gaslighting (including fat-shaming), 3) medical misogyny, 4) body objectification, 5) pathologizing gender/sexual diversity, 6) medical racism, 7) trivializing sexual trauma, and 8) workplace misogyny. 

When books have been written about these topics individually, they often come from voices from “outside” medicine, such as journalists and patients. Inevitably, their views are critical. Consented is the first book project that provides an insider’s dissection of medical education and healthcare delivery and calls for a feminist revolution from within the medical community. Yet it is written from a compassionate and unifying perspective without pinning physicians and patients against each other. In her vulnerable, poignant, passionate, and funny writing style, Zed shares her personal growth as a physician and person.

The historical research of Consented was done through the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium fellowship by the prestigious Massachusetts Historical Society. During this 10-week, full-time research fellowship, Zed accessed archival collections of Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Brown University, and Smith College.

Represented by Kathryn Wilms from The Rights Factory, the Consented book proposal is ready for submission to editors.