(Cleghorn looks at western Europe fairly broadly in the early part of the book, but the closer she gets to the present day the more she focuses on Anglophone bio-medicine in the UK and US.) I appreciated her awareness of how race and class affect how women are treated: wealthy white women might be patronised or infantilised about their illnesses, but Black women's pain is often dismissed by physicians as non-existent. On the one hand, Elinor Cleghorn writes with convincing passion about how the long-standing patriarchal biases of the medical profession have resulted in the misunderstanding of women's illnesses and suffering, and have often compounded them. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy.
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.Įlinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago.
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