Today’s New Verse News: WHY DO DOCTORS IGNORE THE CLITORIS?
a found poem by Diane Kendig
derived from the article “Half the World Has a Clitoris: Why Don’t Doctors Study It?” by Rachel E. Gross, The New York Times, October 17, 2022
Anatomy of the Clitoris and Penis—3D Model available from Etsy.
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Compare the vulva to a small town in the Midwest. Doctors tend to pass through it barely looking up on their way to their destination, the cervix and uterus. If the vulva…is an underappreciated city the clitoris is a local roadside bar …a deep structure, made up largely of erectile tissue reaching into the pelvis encircling the vagina. Documented injuries to the clitoris could be prevented… if doctors just spent more time getting to know the clitoris, …intimately bound up in female pleasure and orgasm, not high on medicine’s priority list. [One urologist] recalled that in medical training the clitoris barely made a cameo. The medical textbook Last’s Anatomy omitted the clitoris entirely. Descriptions of the penis went on for pages.
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Diane Kendig is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, The New Verse News, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write.