I ended up writing a whole book about it – Exposed, out 27 June – which digs into this complicated past. And the stories and cases I found were more shocking than I expected; so shocking, in fact, that I had nightmares after a day of writing about it.

Even the very origin of the pelvic exam is horrifying. It began with a man named James Marion Sims, a physician practising in Alabama in the mid-1800s who did most of his work on enslaved Black women. He’s famous for performing surgeries to repair fistulas (a complication of childbirth) and developed the speculum as part of this. However, he used it for medical research on women beyond the treatment of fistulas and subjected many enslaved women to surgery without anaesthesia (both because anaesthesia was dangerous at the time and because of racist perceptions that Black women didn’t experience the same level of pain that white women did). From the very start, men were using this instrument on the most vulnerable women’s bodies, often inflicting pain.

In more modern history, when Dr George Papanicolaou was first establishing the Papanicolaou screening test (more commonly known as the ‘pap smear’) at Cornell Medical Center in the early 20th century, any woman who came in for any gynaecological treatment was required to get a smear test, even if it wasn’t necessary. At the time, they needed to gather more evidence about whether the smear test was effective at catching cancer, but were these patients really giving informed consent? Did they really understand what was happening to their bodies or were many of these procedures just for the promotion of medicine?

“I’m a medical historian – these are the shocking secrets of pelvic exams you’ve probably never been told”