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What Can Feminist Epistemology Do for Surgery?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Mary Jean Walker  and
Wendy Rogers
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Abstract

Surgery is an important part of contemporary health care, but currently much of surgery lacks a strong evidence base. Uptake of evidence‐based medicine (EBM) methods within surgical research and among practitioners has been slow compared with other areas of medicine. Although this is often viewed as arising from practical and cultural barriers, it also reflects a lack of epistemic fit between EBM research methods and surgical practice. In this paper we discuss some epistemic challenges in surgery relating to this lack of fit, and investigate how resources from feminist epistemology can help to characterize them. We point to ways in which these epistemic challenges may be addressed by gathering and disseminating evidence about what works in surgery using methods that are contextual, pluralistic, and sensitive to hierarchies.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 404 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP120101092) and a Macquarie University Research Development Grant. The funders did not have any input into or control over the content of this article. We thank Cynthia Townley, Katrina Hutchison, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

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