@Katalanta wrote:
I heard the term "pelvic exam" when I was around 12 years old, and felt inspired to look it up in the encyclopedia. There was a full description of exactly how to perform one, complete with drawings. And of course my findings there lead to looking up the words "speculum" and "rectal exam" as well. I must have read that description dozens of times before turning to the internet to conduct more research. I also took many trips to the public library and would read books on puberty (for boys and girls) and the types of exams that doctors would perform, various procedures, and on different medical maladies and the treatments that accompanied them. Anything that required mild surgery or a painful procedure was quite interesting to read about.
Yep. Yep, yep, yep, this was -- no, is -- my obsession. It's like a compulsion by now.
By the time I was in junior high or so, I knew I was fascinated by whatever happened behind those closed doors. I wanted to know so bad, I needed to see it. And then I discovered libraries ... and bookstores ... had these books that would tell me. So I nonchalantly sauntered over to a certain quiet part of the library and sneak looks at books about Adolescent Development or Our Bodies, Our Selves. Then I found books on different kinds of doctors, even one entire kind of doctor that just looked at the girly parts of girls!
I didn't understand at the time, or almost ever, until recently, that my fetish was driven by that position of dominance and willing submission between a doctor and a patient. And I knew that I hated the stuff that doctors did, so I wanted to learn all about the really invasive or painful procedures, or humiliating types of exams because I wanted to understand just how much pain someone would willingly submit to be done to themselves by a doctor. At that time I still thought of dentists as torturers, and so this became my obsession.
Books at school libraries... Books at the local library... Books at college... That's an interesting one. I went to a large Ivy and so we had lots of libraries with lots of books. We had a medical school...but not in the same city. But I found all these historic books on how to do things to girls.... I mean, on early medicine... and I spent a lot of time "studying" in that library.
Even today, I'm finding ways to satisfy this obsession... So for those who are curious, here's a few resources:
1. Download "emancipated" books on PDF -- http://b-ok.cc -- I dislike this idea, but I'm OTOH I am not going to pay $175 for a book that will help me get my rocks off for a few hours or less!
2. Google Books -- lots of earlier textbooks and medical texts can be found here, sometimes in full, often times enough previewable that you can see the table of contents to know if there's anything you want to see. Then you go to (1) and get it.
3. National Library of Medicine -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ -- great indexes on all books and journal articles. Find what you want, and get the reference number called the DOI and go to...
4. Sci Hub -- various URLs but they change as different countries shut them down -- http://sci-hub.hk and http://sci-hub.tw have been working for me lately. Some articles don't have a DOI, so the PMID works in a pinch.
Sci Hub was definitely created by a Richard Stallman "Information Wants To Be Free!" kind of hacker named Alexandra (https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra) who wanted to study Cognitive- and Neuro-Science and was shocked and appalled to see what a scam the medical journal publishers have pulled. To be successful, you have to publish. To publish, you have to go to respected journals. To research or know the current research, you have to pay mega $$$$ to the medical journals for reprints ... of research .... that entire other organizations did and paid for.
See what I mean? Obsessed. But, damn, I sure as hell know a lot more about medicine and doctors and "stuff" now than most folks walking down the street!
--Scott