A Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (SFS) professor argued that traditional medical treatment has historically neglected those with chronic illness at a Georgetown University event Jan. 12.
Emily Mendenhall, the director of Georgetown’s science, technology and international affairs (STIA) program, launched her book “Invisible Illness: A History from Hysteria to Long Covid,” which explains how the U.S. medical system supports individuals with chronic conditions and disabilities. At the event — hosted at the Mortara Center for International Studies by the Medical Humanities Initiative, the STIA program, the Disability Cultural Center and the disability studies program — Mendenhall outlined the shortcomings in the U.S. medical system, its relationship with disability and societal perceptions of individuals with chronic conditions.
Mendenhall said her research highlights how the health care system has forgotten people with chronic and poorly understood illnesses.
“Most people, disabled from an unverifiable illness, must advocate for themselves, feeling abandoned by the state, ignored by clinical medicine and adrift financially, socially and emotionally,” Mendenhall said at the event. “In addition to losing our health and our ability to support ourselves, we have been disbelieved, gaslit and not even acknowledged by our leaders that our illness is significant, and a significant threat to others.”
Mendenhall said this lack of recognition is a result of the historical treatment of women, people of color and other marginalized groups in medicine.
“These unverifiable health conditions are interpreted with trepidation,” Mendenhall said. “In many cases throughout history, such conditions have been considered unreal or imagined among medical professionals, or a cry to help from a hysterical woman.”
Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan, the director of Georgetown’s Medical Humanities Initiative and a panelist at the event, said chronic illnesses are sidelined in biomedical training.
“In biomedicine, we have a structural bias towards acuity,” Krishnan said at the event. “We have a medical system that’s built around the conditions that threaten to kill you immediately. That is what we are taught and prioritized in medical school.”
Amy Kenny — the inaugural director of the Disability Cultural Center at Georgetown, a university group that promotes accessibility in the sciences, arts and broader Georgetown community — said Mendenhall’s book helps readers reconsider prominent disability narratives that are often oversimplified.
“I think it’s important to name that disability is an identity, an experience, a community and a culture,” Kenny said. “And so often, disability and disability narratives are relegated to just one of those. And we create these binaries that I think the book is really inviting us to reconsider and, I hope, dismantle.”
Krishnan said Mendenhall’s book captures how medical bias often leaves patients with chronic illness underserved.
“Chronic illnesses, particularly those without a single definitive test result or biomarker, are too often treated as background noise, or in the worst cases, less real, less serious, less deserving of resources, even when they are reorganizing entire lives,” Krishnan said. “The encouraging thing, and something that the book captures well, is how this is changing in the extraordinary work that has happened over decades.”
Yasmin Aflaki (MED ’29), who attended the event, said it brought attention to the gap in medical education surrounding chronic illness.
“As a first-year medical student, what really struck me being at this talk was the discussion surrounding chronic illness that was touched upon,” Aflaki told The Hoya. “It is not something we have really learned yet as medical students. I’ve never heard of the term ‘long COVID’ before. So I think a lot of work needs to be done in medical education.”
Mendenhall said students must confront the structures that have excluded certain voices in the medical field.
“You need to use your voices and your feet,” Mendenhall said. “I feel joyful thinking about teaching all of you young people because you have power and you are armed with knowledge. Medicine, society and politics, these spaces, you can do good by being thoughtful and knowing the history, and using that voice to be a force of good.”
