Perceptions of women’s pain can be obscured by gendered myths and hysterical assumptions. Prevailing social stereotypes about the way women express, experience, and tolerate pain have been ingrained in medicine across its history. Modern medicine has evolved under male-dominated conditions; in the past, many scientific studies have excluded female participants to eliminate the possibility of female sex hormones influencing the results. This has resulted in an enormous knowledge gap in the medical profession between the male and the female body. This project questions whether the pattern of ‘hysterical’ women in medicine is something that can be confined to history or remains a pervasive issue today. Although hysteria as a mental health condition was removed from medical texts in the 1980s, the term is still used to describe symptoms in the context of mental illness. This, coupled with the lack of scientific knowledge into the female body, means that today women are still more likely to receive minor tranquilisers and antidepressants, rather than analgesic pain medication. They are less likely to be referred for diagnostic investigations and more likely to be left with the unhelpful diagnosis of Medically Unexplained Symptoms, which perhaps could be called the contemporary name for hysteria. Wallpaper was selected as a medium due to its societal connotations with domesticity and therefore inherently with the female body. The medium and colour draws from ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a novel written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. Gilman was a fierce critic of the medical oppression of women’s bodies and minds. The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of an unnamed narrator who descends into madness after she is prescribed ‘rest cure’, a repressive medical treatment that called for strict isolation, often imposed on women with postpartum depression or what was called ‘hysteria’, including Gilman herself. The narrator begins to see a woman trapped in the wallpaper pattern. During my research, I have investigated artists that have explored themes of the female body, fertility, and health. Included in this is Louise Bourgeois’ work A L’Infini, a series of sixteen large works on paper of depictions of the female body at different stages of life, couples, childbirth, disembodied limbs, and body parts. As well as Tracy Emin’s Terribly Wrong that focussed on personal memories of an abortion. In this context it is powerful that Emin chose the medium of monoprint, which is unlike other printing methods as only a single image can be created. In this project the pattern is a re-imagining of ‘Clinical Studies on the Great Hysterical Attack’. This was a work created by Anatomical artist Paul Richer in 1881, which included diagrammatic drawings of the female body representing four stages of hysteria. The pattern was created by enlarging, re-arranging, and repeating, these hysterical representations of women from the Victorian period. The pills in the pattern represent more contemporary imagery of gender bias within the medicine, as there is still much missing knowledge of the side effects of medicine on the female body. The work has been created using a lino block printing process, the method used in the Victorian period to create wallpaper. The female bodies were printed using one large lino sheet and the pills were stamped on afterwards.