This piece is an incredibly eye-opening historical analysis, illuminating the seemingly echoing experiences of women throughout history as they face the ignorance and lies perpetrated by the healthcare providers placed on pedestals above them. The domino effect of each prominent male medical figure onto the next is also explored, as the ideas of an untamed, feral womb and women as unreliable narrators of their own bodies are passed down through generations of medical practices.

The book was inspired by her own experience with undiagnosed lupus. ‘Unwell Women: A journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World’ by scholar Elinor Cleghorn is an exposé of medicine’s treatment of women throughout history and how it tightly intertwines with misogynistic and patriarchal societal beliefs of the time. 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.“The history of medicine, of illness, is every bit as social and cultural as it is scientific,” Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn 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.

Unwell women by elinor cleghorn