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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.
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
1. Wandering Wombs
On the Greek island of Kos many centuries ago, a girl was taken ill. At first, she felt strangely weak, her chest heavy and tight. Soon she began to shiver with fever; pain gripped her heart; terrifying hallucinations swarmed her mind. She was found wandering the streets, so consumed by heat and hurt that she wanted to end her life. Throwing herself down a well or hanging from a tree by a noose would have been pleasant compared with the torment that wracked her body and mind. Her father called for the physician-a man trained in the arts of healing. The physician had seen this illness before in girls who had started to menstruate but hadn't yet married. As they developed into puberty, their plentiful female blood had been used up by growing. Once they had grown into women, all that extra blood accumulated in their wombs, ready to spill out every month. All physicians knew that this was how the female body stayed healthy. This girl was drowning in her own blood. It had no way to flow out, so it had traveled from her womb back through her veins, inflaming her heart and poisoning her senses. The physician urged the girl's father to marry her off without delay. Intercourse would open her body so that her blood would flow out, and pregnancy would make her healthy.
In another home on the island, an older married woman was seized by a violent convulsion. Her eyes rolled back, she ground her teeth, and saliva foamed in her mouth. Her skin was deathly cold; her abdomen wrenched with pain. Her husband called for the physician. This malady often befell women of her age who had stopped having sex and bearing children. He watched the woman writhe and sob and noted that her skin was clammy. The woman's womb, empty and dry because it wasn't being filled, had crept toward her liver in search of moisture. From there it had blocked her diaphragm and robbed her of breath. The woman was being suffocated by her own womb. Soon, the physician hoped, phlegm would flow from her head to moisten her womb and weigh it down. The physician listened to the woman's belly for the gurgling sounds of the womb returning to its rightful place. If it lingered too long near her liver, she would choke to death. If only she had been having sex regularly, she might have been spared this misery.
Women like this haunt The Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of medical discourse attributed to Hippocrates of Kos, the Greek physician known as the father of medicine, from the Classical era-the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. As a teacher and physician, Hippocrates revolutionized medicine. He debunked centuries-old superstitions that diseases were punishments doled out by vengeful gods. He taught that ill health arose from imbalances in the body, and he invented the patient case study, writing careful notes about the symptoms and course of a person's illness and prescribing herbal recipes as treatments. He vowed to treat all illness, in all people, to the best of his ability and to never abuse the body of any man or woman. Whether his patient was freeborn or enslaved, he promised to do no harm: Hippocrates's oath became the cornerstone of patient ethics, and it is still sworn by medical graduates today.
Hippocrates emphasized how women's bodies and illnesses needed to be dealt with very differently from those of men. He stressed how important it was for physicians to "learn correctly from a patient the origin of her disease" by questioning her "immediately and in detail about the cause." Many women, he remarked, suffered and died because physicians proceeded to treat their diseases like "diseases in men." But even though he acknowledged...
Reviews-
May 1, 2021
In her debut work, Cleghorn who holds a PhD in humanities and cultural studies, crafts an informative overview of medical practices, focusing in particular on medicine's disregard for women patients and for women as healers and physicians. Starting with the ancient Greeks, threading through the Victorian era and a post-World War II England and United States, and ending at the present day, Cleghorn recounts stories of harm and abuse brought upon women by the medical establishment. She doesn't shy away from describing the compounded pain brought to bear on Black women when white women fought for their own rights at Black women's expense. Some descriptions are almost too painful to read; however, the author honors these women and reminds readers that their lives were very much real, even as they were dehumanized by physicians. Especially notable are sections about the origins of gynecology and about 19th-century physicians' scant knowledge of ovaries and fallopian tubes. Cleghorn weaves in her own story towards the book's end; it mirrors the stories of the women throughout history who were considered unreliable narrators of their own health. VERDICT An insightful account that is especially recommended for those interested in the history of medicine where it intersects with women's health, as well as readers interested in women's and gender studies.--Rachel M. Minkin, Michigan State Univ. Libs., East Lansing
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 1, 2021 From time immemorial, as long as there have been physicians, there has been a double standard when it comes to women's health. Medicine, a science one hopes will be flawless, has an imperfect history, due in part to its being a product of the values and beliefs of its time, as are the scientific and technical strides its findings inspire. The ancient Greeks, the founders of medical science, deemed women to be inferior to men, and that unfortunate and erroneous attitude prevailed throughout the centuries. Some say it lingers still. From the female reproductive system to autoimmune and endocrine diseases to mental-health disorders, medicine has viewed gender and biology through the same lens, and in a field dominated by male physicians, researchers, and scholars, that perspective has often been derisive and dismissive of women's genuine health concerns. Feminist historian and academic Cleghorn, herself a victim of medical misdiagnosis, brings first-hand knowledge of the gender bias endemic in the medical profession to this scholarly yet personal, specific yet comprehensive study of dangerously outdated medical practices and attitudes.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from April 15, 2021 A feminist historian and cultural critic explores how age-old myths about gender roles and behaviors have shaped the history of medicine. Medical science is notorious for misunderstanding the ailments of female bodies. Throughout this illuminating and disturbing survey, Cleghorn argues convincingly that this is because medicine is a patriarchal science. Hippocrates believed that the uterus controlled women's health. Following in his footsteps, later Greek physicians blamed female illness on "wandering womb[s]." The author suggests that Hippocrates' ideas aligned with the prevailing view that women existed solely for the purposes of childbearing/rearing. Hippocratic misogyny became entrenched in later European cultural and medical thinking, as suggested by how more "enlightened" doctors from the 18th century still blamed (White) women's physical and emotional pains on reproductive malfunctions. Enslaved women of color fared far worse: At best, they were the objects of cruel experiments because White patriarchy had deemed them unable to feel pain. By the mid-1800s, early suffragists like Harriet Taylor Mill, whom doctors diagnosed with "nervous disorders," began to more openly question the patriarchal status quo. But the patriarchal establishment used the old argument of hysteria to discredit them and their political activities. As White women became more socially empowered in the 20th century, medicine became another tool of patriarchy to control them. In the 1920s and '30s, the American medical establishment sanctioned forced sterilization of thousands of Black Southern women "in the name of social improvement." A decade later in Britain, the British government controlled White female reproduction with welfare programs designed to "encourage women to produce and nurture citizens of the future." Thoughtful and often disturbing, this exhaustively researched book shows why women--including minority women and Cleghorn herself, who has lupus--must fight to be heard in a system that not only ignores them, but often makes them sicker. Powerful, provocative, necessary reading.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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