Welcome to Madame Ovary! My husband picked the domain name many years ago as he said "what do you call a gynecologist who was a French minor in college ?". I try to help my patients with the best medical information, from a humanistic point of view. My name is Mary Jane Minkin and I have had the privilege of taking care of women for over 50 years and I have spent alot of time filtering out what is true and helpful for the well being of my patients. My bio is available on the About page. The goal of this website is to share with you medically accurate information on menopause and other women's health topics.

There are relatively few famous fictional OB/GYNs. Among the most notable is Dr. Wilbur Larch, the hero of John Irving’s great novel, The Cider House Rules. Dr. Larch is based on the life of Irving’s grandfather, who was the physician in chief of the Boston Lying In Hospital at the turn of the 20th century. Dr. Larch’s motto was “I must be of use.”

I truly hope that this website will be “of use” for all of its visitors, both patients and practitioners alike. Women really want to understand the changes that our bodies, indeed our lives undergo as we mature through our reproductive and post-reproductive years. To my sensibilities, a good OB/GYN should be a woman’s health physician, rather than exclusively a reproductive specialist. Female health encompasses all of our body’s organ systems, and we need an integrative appreciation of how these systems interconnect and evolve.

The content includes two general videos, one on menopause and a separate one on menopause for cancer survivors. There are also many videos from media appearances where I discuss diverse medical topics. I have also provided several flavors of companion written content, in the form of excerpts from my published guides, pdf copies of a few of my academic papers that I think are especially `on point`, and a list of important recent references on the subject matter. Additionally, on the Podcasts page there are a number of clips that cover a wide range of related content, presented as podcasts developed by me or featuring me in interviews hosted by well-established medical communicators.

Finally, I would encourage all of my visitors to look at my Blog. This is co-written and researched with my MIT-educated mathematician husband, and is built upon daily discussions over the last 30 years of the evolution of medicine and health care within our society. The initial set of Posts was developed as a single intertwined unit, introduced and motivated by the first entry, which is entitled `Prologue: Why I Left Electronic Medical Recordkeeping`. We hope that this will provide a clearer understanding of some recent changes to health care, and their potential longer-term implications, and that many more folks “outside of a small circle of friends” will be inspired to act to improve the system in ways large and small. Let us all be of use.