They could tell me what was happening in my body, but they couldn’t say why I got it or why I, as a woman, am more susceptible to it. (Pop star Selena Gomez has spoken candidly about her struggles with the complex, incurable disease.) “I was trying to get to grips with why none of my doctors could really explain much about it. And Unwell Women shows how the legacy of disenfranchisement and discrimination persists even today, resulting in the underrepresentation of women in medical trials, prevailing ideas that women’s pain is psychological or emotional, and an inadequate, at times hostile system that’s more likely to offer women antidepressants and tranquilizers than referral for further diagnosis and more targeted care.Ĭleghorn was inspired to write the book after her own experience of being dismissed by doctors for years before finally being diagnosed with systemic lupus, a difficult-to-pinpoint disease that is nine times more prevalent among women than men.

Biological theories about female bodies were used to reinforce and uphold constraining social ideas about women Elinor CleghornĪ former Oxford researcher with a background in feminist culture and history, Cleghorn meticulously constructs an often enraging framework to evince how and why the patriarchal medical world has been so detrimental to women, especially underserved women and women of color. From the wandering womb of ancient Greece (the idea that a displaced uterus caused many of women’s illnesses) and the witch trials in medieval Europe, through the dawn of hysteria, to modern myths around menstruation, she lays bare the unbelievable and sometimes horrific treatment of women for millennia in the name of medicine. “Biological theories about female bodies were used to reinforce and uphold constraining social ideas about women.”Ĭleghorn’s new book, Unwell Women, enumerates a litany of ways in which women’s bodies and minds have been misunderstood and misdiagnosed through history.

But even the author Elinor Cleghorn, who spent the past year immersed in the history of women’s relationship to medicine, was surprised by “just how conscious and insidious it was”, she told the Guardian. The history of medicine is every bit as social and cultural as it is scientific, and male dominance is cemented in its foundations.

Unwell women book