Women and Medicine: Some Notes from an Epistemological Point of View

This paper analyzes a quite recently developed branch of medicine, that is, gender-specific medicine, in order to assess whether this new sub-discipline is epistemologically well-grounded. Even if gender-specific medicine has some important merits that cannot be disregarded, we also think that it still needs to be analyzed and discussed in greater detail by examining the role of women as subjects of knowledge and as objects of knowledge in medicine. In both cases, we would like to prove not only that the two concepts of sex and gender cannot be detached from other concepts such as race, ethnos, social class, age, and religion, but also that further empirical research is still necessary in order to evaluate both women's role in medicine and the effectiveness of gender-specific medicine