A female nurse in my girlfriend’s hospital was forbidden by her Muslim boyfriend to be an OR nurse, because time and again “she touched the genitals of other men.”
Needless to say, this was, and is, totally ridiculous.
Whether the nurse and/or patient is male or female, the medical philosophy should always be about the well-being of the patient in the very first place, and modesty (in whatever guise) should be considered as a minor detail (at best).
Ladies and gentle men: some of us tend to be prude when it comes to the bodies we hide underneath our clothes, but medical professionals see genitals all the time — and usually not in circumstances that would seduce those people to fantasize. (“There’s nothing sexy about a little wrinkled knob of skin which oozes pus !”)
In emergencies, these considerations are even less important: when you suffer from a bowel infarction, an urgent stool problem, a severe case of appendicitis or a crushed foot, it shouldn’t and doesn’t matter how your genitals look like — shaven or not, stinking or not, long or short, asymmetrical or mathematically very pleasant.
They’ve all seen it before, and even in more grotesque circumstances and proportions you could ever imagine. But you are simply a patient now —
And you need to get better.
SOURCES: “Treatise on gynæcology : medical and surgical" (1891), S. J. Pozzi and B. H. Wells, New York: W. Wood.
