Helen King in Immaculate Forms presents an interesting history of the female body, culture, and medical ideas through four body parts. The body parts, breast, clitoris, hymen, and womb, have had a charged existence throughout history from a mostly western point of view. King takes each on and examines it throughout time giving detailed descriptions as well as common assumptions. While at times humorous, King takes the topics seriously with a wealth of citations and examples. While not linear in time, she is clear and writes on the different time periods with little judgement. She makes no claims that one time period is smarter, wiser or otherwise, over another and indeed claims that for all our modern knowledge we still know very little about women’s bodies. Overall it is a delightful book that gives a great overview of how women’s bodies were viewed and understood throughout western history.

Book of the year 2024 to me, honestly. You'd think reading one book from the genre "history of women patients and female doctors" would have taught me every fucked up thing there is to know about it, but you do wonder how many more vile treatments women have been subjected to in the past now that, thanks to Helen King, I discovered I had only breached the surface of medical malpractice. Similarly to Elinor Cleghorn's Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World, Immaculate Forms is a never-ending well of medical anecdotes (in the broader sense, since few of them are funny) to tell my healthcare coworkers on the job and hopefully teach them a lesson. Besides the enjoyable writing, this book boasts an
astonishingly gorgeous cover and title that I don't get tired of gazing at. Bravo!

This book was a great read. It was funny in parts and strange in others.

The biggest thing is that I learned so much, including how they used to get it so wrong about the female body. As someone intrigued by old science, reading bout how much science has evolved and is still so far behind in terms of the female body really opens up your eyes to the wide gap in medical research that men were afforded and what women were denied.

The trend that you notice when reading this book is the constant denial from men throughout history that a natural part of a woman's body isn't real or is useless for men and, therefore, should be ignored by science for a long time.

I cannot stop talking about this book with my friends, and it has become my icebreaker when a lull in a conversation happens. Whether my friends like it or not, I will be info-dumping from this book to them for the next few years whenever a conversation gets quiet.

A must read book that made me learn and think
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Wow, what a book! It would have been very easy for a book on this topic to either slide into smugness about the errors people in previous generations made in thinking about our bodies or a useless essentialism. But King was very alert to these possibilities and was able to avoid them. There's a ton of information in this book, but I found it to be a fascinating read. Each chapter probably could have been a whole book on its own, there's so much to explore. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the topic.