All in Her Head
Elizabeth Comen is an oncologist specializing in breast cancer, and as she worked with her patients, she came to realize just how badly our medical system is set up -- for everyone, but particularly for women. Looking back into history, she collected evidence and traced stories illustrating how attitudes and beliefs have come down to us and are still hanging around.
Dr. Comen works through chapters dedicated to systems of the human body, starting with skin, bones, and muscles, right through to nerves, hormones, and reproduction. (While the entire book is enraging, this guarantees that the intensity will ramp up and the most enraging material will probably be at the end.) Readers will probably be familiar with quite a few of the stories already -- Ignaz Semmelweis' failed attempts to get doctors to wash their hands, the horrific gynecological experiments done upon enslaved women -- but they are essential parts of the story, and Comen brings in many more that are unfamiliar. It's fascinating, and as I said enraging, and very enlightening as well.
The short version is that for the entire history of medicine, the men who wrote the books have considered women to be a) "a deformed variation of the male ideal," b) problematic in pretty much every way, c) mysterious, scary, and in need of control, d) undependable, dramatic and likely delusional, and e) inherently leaky. And despite all our progress and talk and efforts, a stunning amount of this is still with us. It still takes years of fighting to get diagnosed with something like endometriosis, fibromyalgia, or often ovarian cancer. Medical trials still consider males the default and females too weird and variable to use. Doctors frequently assume that women patients are being dramatic, emotional, and irrational.
And pretty much only women will read this book, because it's a about women, and therefore a niche thing, not for men to worry about.
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