A solid overview of the patriarchal history of formalized medicine as it pertains to the treatment of ill women.

Thank you, Dutton, for an advanced copy of this important book. Since its publication, I have purchased a copy and am woefully behind in providing feedback to your team.
As a women’s health physician, I know this topic is shamefully under-addressed and incredibly misunderstood. Thank you for to highlighting healthcare disparities and historical ignorance pertaining for a full 1/2 of the world’s population.

I reference Elinor Cleghorn's excellent book in my book "Not Too Old For That: How Women are Changing the Story of Aging. It's infuriating how women's health concerns have been marginalized for so long, and how many women have been harmed by that. I highly recommend this book, not only for women but for all the people who care about women.

A fascinating history of women. As something with a chronic illness this book piqued my interest. I will never forget about wandering wombs.

This book is well-written in a conversational tone that isn't difficult to read (despite the topic) while also not being condescending, which can be a hard balance.

This book is an absolute must-read! I was familiar with some of the unfortunate history of "hysteria" and women being told that if we experience any pain or illness - "it is all in our head." - but I never realized the extent to which women's bodies and illness has been used to keep women socially obedient. Elinor Cleghorn does a very thorough job in her research (both in the UK where she is based and in the US). Not only does she cover the vast disparities in how women have been treated throughout history by the medical profession, she effectively calls out the additional inequities faced by women of color. Heroes do emerge in this book -- the brave women and a few men who championed a focus on women's health and who were willing to challenge the systemic sexism and racism in medical diagnosis and treatment. She also shares a shocking statistic - that of the 4 million people worldwide who have an auto-immune disease, 80% are women. She eloquently describes her experience living with an auto-immune disease. I was horrified to learn that in the 1940:s and 1950's - auto-immune diseases were viewed as psychosomatic illnesses only and one of the recommended treatments was a lobotomy. I would like to say medicine has come a long way since then but there are still great inequities and disparities so our work is not done. This book is a call to action for all of us.

I highly recommend this book!

UNWELL WOMEN: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I have PTSD of being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and being told it’s everything from psychosomatic to cancer. I related to this book so much. It’s something that any woman (struggling with an illness or not) should read.

NOTE: I was provided an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Well-researched book discussing women in healthcare. A bit dry and lengthy at times but overall well written and informative.

I read a lot of horror, but the most horrible thing is what people do to other people. Reading Unwell Women would almost be funny until the reader remembers that all these bizarre things really happened to women and happened to women for thousands of years. Even until the 1950's most medical problems of women were blamed on their reproductive organs and problems with their reproductive organs were blamed on mental illness. Even today, with autoimmune diseases, it takes only two years for a man to be diagnosed but 7 years for a woman to be diagnosed with diseases like MS or Lupus. Why? Because men's pain is considered to be real and women's pain is considered imaginary.

One of the most bizarre things was that doctors used to think that a uterus could travel through a woman's body and caused all kinds of havoc, including strangling her.

I would buy this book to keep on hand for research. The strangest things have been done to women, and believed about women, in the name of medical care.

Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to review a digital copy of Unwell Women.

This books starts with Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks and works its way through history to lay out the misinformation and bias against women in Western medicine has and continues to affect the way women are treated and diagnosed with disease. At lot of this history is brutal. Terrible things have been done particularly to BIPOC, disabled, and poor women throughout history, and this book does not shy away from that truth.

This book isn't an easy read, but it's an important one to understand the biases that exist in medicine today, like how many women don't know the signs of a heart attack because popular media focuses on the signs that appear in men. Or the multi-year process it takes to get a diagnosis of a chronic, or autoimmune disease, both of which disproportionately affect women.

Elinor Cleghorn offers an epic yet approachable social, cultural and scientific history of women's health in Unwell Women, tracing the sexism and racism seen in modern Western medicine from ancient times through the present day.

"We are taught that medicine is the art of solving our body's mysteries," Cleghorn writes in the introduction. "And we expect medicine, as a science, to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality." But, as she shows over the following chapters, medicine is anything but impartial, steeped as it is in social and cultural histories. From its earliest recorded days in ancient Greek texts, medicine has both inherited and reinforced the socially constructed gender binary, falsely reducing womanhood to a person's "capacity--and duty--to reproduce."

Drawing on extensive research, Cleghorn reveals medicine's long history of misdiagnosing--and mistreating--women, with sections on ancient and medieval times, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the mid-20th century to today. The resulting tome is massive in scope, but in Cleghorn's expert hands, this long history does not feel unwieldy. Each chapter carries clearly into the next, as Cleghorn peels back the layers upon layers of misogyny and sexism baked into medical concepts of "unwell women"--and the corresponding "treatment" options that often did, and do, more harm than good.

Throughout, she also acknowledges the depth of racism inherent in the already sexist system, calling out the horrors inflicted on enslaved Black women in the United States in the name of research, for example, and the non-consensual testing of birth control methods (including sterilization) on women of color across history. She traces the ties between the women's suffrage movement and today's access to birth control, and reveals links between Victorian ideals of a chaste womanhood and the modern fight for reproductive justice.

Despite the dark side of this history--including Cleghorn's own experience having chronic symptoms dismissed and overlooked--Unwell Women is ultimately hopeful. As Cleghorn reveals how medicine's evolution has continually been hampered by the constructs of gender norms, she also spotlights the incredible voices that have agitated for change for centuries, "women raising their heads above the parapet to ensure that women are represented, cared for, and listened to." These women are a model for what we can carry into the future, regardless of gender identity: a call to women to advocate for themselves, true, but also for the system to acknowledge the change it needs to make from within--making Unwell Women a powerful and necessary work of social and cultural history. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Shelf Talker: An epic yet accessible social, cultural and scientific history of women's health traces the roots of sexism and racism in modern Western medicine from ancient texts through to the present day.

“This book delves into the ways that androcentric medicine has studied, assessed, and defined the biological and anatomical conditions labeled ‘female.’”

In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn compiles and exposes the history of women’s medicine. Beginning with Hippocrates and stretching to the present, this book presents countless stories of women suffering at the hands of male doctors. Whether the theories those doctors espoused are laugh-out-loud ridiculous or downright horrifying, they are important to read.

“For the uterus does not issue forth like an animal from a lair.”

You wouldn’t think it possible for a medical male to believe that an internal organ could move about on its own, but believe it they did. “Hysteria” is not a new word in our vocabulary, but how many individuals know that it refers to a “disease” that women were diagnosed with when doctors thought that their suffering was caused by a wandering womb? It’s almost too absurd to bear, but women had to face this kind of infantile “medicine” for hundreds of years, all the while undergoing insane and dehumanizing treatments for their “illness”.

“An unfulfilled, unemployed uterus could move out of place, wreaking havoc on the organs it reached.”

The fact that women’s reproductive rights have been at issue...forever, essentially, boggles the mind. Cleghorn uses so many sources to show just how far this fight reaches, how women have always been forced to shoulder the responsibility of furthering the species, and how every part of that “duty” has invaded society. I had never before questioned why I, a cis woman, had to receive yearly STD screening. I always assumed it was strictly for my own health. And it is for my own health, and my partners of course, but the history of female STD screenings goes back to premarital laws requiring women to receive such tests before marriage. To protect her potential husband from disease and her potential children from birth defects. And today, the CDC recommends that women, gay men, and those who engage in risky sex should receive yearly STD testing. Heterosexual men are not included in that list. Women are still expected to undergo uncomfortable tests—sure, sure, for our own health—while het men are allowed to volunteer.

“If a woman ever did become a genius, she would ‘no longer be a woman in the true biological sense of the word.’”

Of the many parts of this book that made me want to scream and rage, the recounting of untold years’ worth of beliefs that women were physically incapable of being anything more than a mother challenged me. I have to applaud Cleghorn and the women she quotes for tackling such asinine thoughts, for I find it difficult to explain my incredulity.

Incredulity is a remarkably apt word for my overall response to this book. It is a sign of Cleghorn’s writing that I reacted so strongly to the histories she tells. I feel as though my mind has been turned sideways, enabling me to view the world from a whole new perspective. One that sees and recognizes the ages old sexism that is pervasive even today. It is institutionalized, it comes from the mouths of people who took what their parents and their parents’ parents told them and internalized it until they can’t even recognize the sheer insanity of their beliefs. It feels inescapable.

But I am not without hope. The progress that has been made thanks to so many incredible women, detailed in this book by Cleghorn, helps me to see a possible future. One where women don’t suffer helplessly. One where women aren’t crushed under the expectations of society.

As Cleghorn says, “women are not only victims of male-dominated medical orthodoxy; they are also powerful, courageous, and sometimes contentious agents of hope and change.”

This is a compelling historical survey of the way that medicine has failed and exploited women since the Classical period and beyond. Cleghorn includes her own perspective as an unwell woman but it is primarily an objective account of the rhetoric that was and is used to control women's bodies, perpetuate myths about child-bearing being the raison d'être of every woman's life, and discredit women's accounts of illness while legitimizing men's accounts. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in an overview of the ways in which the medical and pharmaceutical fields are driven by outdated ideas about women's bodies.

I have a longstanding interest in medical misogyny and have really enjoyed books like Sex Matters by Dr. Alyson McGregor; Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by English and Ehrenreich, and Doing Harm by Dusenbery. I was therefore very intrigued by Unwell Women - and loved the book.

Whereas Sex Matters and Doing Harm (both fairly recent) focus on the statistical side of medical misogyny (like what percentage of drug clinical trials sex disaggregate their data), I loved that Unwell Women took a different approach and instead tied the history of false ‘women’s diseases’ like “womb suffocation” to hysteria and ovaritis - the belief that women’s reproductive organs were weakening us physically and mentally and resulted in all manner of medical and social ills committed by women. I particularly liked the section on how women’s minds have been considered weak and women are thought to overstate or mentally conjure up their pain and that connection to somatization and somatic disorders. I appreciated that the book made sure to drive home that women were once doctors before being pushed out (in medieval times!), and that women have been fighting against medical misogyny for many centuries - we haven't been taking such mistreatment lying down.

I do wish the book had pushed further in talking about how psychiatry is being used to delegitimize women’s physcial pain and experiences, but perhaps that is another book on its own, a modern day follow up to Women and Madness. I also wish that the book had gone more into medical misogyny and its implications for Native American women, Asian women, Latina women, and other women of color though I was glad that Cleghorn made an effort to include the disparities in treatment and outcomes for black women.

Unwell Women was an engaging read, full of useful and compelling information that chronologically follows medical developments, theories, treatments, and experiments from the Ancient Greeks to today, with particular attention paid to the United States and United Kingdom. I highly recommend this book - and am rating it 5 stars!. Those interested in history, the history of medicine, women’s health, and feminism will find this an engaging, eye-opening read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dutton for a a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Unwell Women will be featured in Biggest Little Library’s Summer New Release Guide 2021 which drops May 15th for Patreon members. Furthermore, a long form review of the book going into further depth on medical misogyny will be published on the blog at biggestlittlelibrary.net/unwell-women-review on June 2nd.