Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women's health--from the earliest medical ideas about women's illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases--brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative.
Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy--and the men who controlled their fate--this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women--and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.
Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy--and the men who controlled their fate--this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women--and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.
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Community Reviews
Highly recommend everyone read. A great crash course in the history of medical sexism and the pathologizing of women's bodies (particularly pathologizing mensturation).
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 interesting, but necessarily those are the topics we know the least about.
Finally, I think the author is unjust in some cases. For example I don't think radical mastectomies happened because of misogyny or lack of sympathy. It was the "logical" surgery to save lives until it was statistically determined not to be beneficial relative to chemotherapy, especially as chemotherapy improved.
I think a book expanding on the more recent topics covered in chapters 17 and 18 would have been more interesting, but necessarily those are the topics we know the least about.
Finally, I think the author is unjust in some cases. For example I don't think radical mastectomies happened because of misogyny or lack of sympathy. It was the "logical" surgery to save lives until it was statistically determined not to be beneficial relative to chemotherapy, especially as chemotherapy improved.
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 up a pen") to asylums and lobotomies to deadly punishment (aka being burned at the stake).
Elinor's book traces the 2500+ year history of this "diagnosis" - and woman's supposed biological inferiority - right up to present day, helping us understand how this legacy currently manifests. Even though we expect medicine to be objective, she illuminates how medicine is every bit as social and cultural as it is scientific, and how this is not just a problem of the past - but can help explain the problems of today. Such as why women are often disbelieved about their own bodies and symptoms, and how women continue to be left out of medical research, and why there is still so much we don't know about diseases that affect women.
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