Unwell Women
Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cultural historian Cleghorn's meticulous and wide-ranging debut examines the links between patriarchy, misogyny, and the mistreatment of women's health needs. Throughout the history of Western medicine, Cleghorn contends, women's complaints have been simplistically tied to their reproductive systems. She discusses how physicians in ancient Greece and medieval Europe believed that the uterus was the cause of hysteria and misbalanced humours, which could be cured by marital sex and regular childbearing. With the discovery of estrogen in the early 20th century, the perceived source of women's physical and mental illnesses shifted from their nerves and uteruses to their hormones. Cleghorn also explains how resistance to letting women practice medicine contributed to female patients suffering in silence, and discusses various "punishments masquerading as therapies," including the force-feeding of jailed suffragists and clitoridectomy as a cure for masturbation. Other medical malpractices include gynecological experimentation on enslaved women, which, Cleghorn argues, persists today in the disbelief of Black women's self-reported pain and in the racial bias that leaves them with worse medical outcomes. After building a damning historical case against the medical field, Cleghorn shares the harrowing story of how her symptoms were "overlooked, ignored, and dismissed" for seven years before she was diagnosed with lupus. The result is a deeply informed and passionately argued call for change.
