Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World

Appalling, Informative, and even Entertaining...mostly because of how stupid "doctors" used to be waaaay back in the day about women and their menstrual cycles.

This is a complete history of medical misogyny in the Western World with a focus on UK and US. I didn't encounter any information I hadn't read before (though some things were, unfortunately, more detailed in this book than I'd previously encountered). If you're ignorant of the subject this would be a pretty complete starter text on the topic.

I think a book expanding on the more recent topics covered in chapters 17 and 18 would have been more int...read more

Some of the historial facts and research can get repetitive - -same research referenced multiple times throughout the book. Packed with historical facts, research, history about medical studies, legislation. Overwhelming to understand and process all the focus that the US and Great Britain (countries that predominated in research) place on regulating and policing womens' bodies.

The father of medicine - Hippocrates (5th century BC) - was the first to use the term "hysteria", which is essentially that the cause of all female illness lies with her uterus. Women were pathologised in this way by some of the most influential thinkers, like Plato, Aristotle and Freud. It has been treated by prescribing everything from marriage and children to sexual abstinence to avoidance of all intellectual pursuits (literally: "don't pick u...read more