UNWELL WOMEN

A feminist historian and cultural critic explores how age-old myths about gender roles and behaviors have shaped the history of medicine.

Medical science is notorious for misunderstanding the ailments of female bodies. Throughout this illuminating and disturbing survey, Cleghorn argues convincingly that this is because medicine is a patriarchal science. Hippocrates believed that the uterus controlled women's health. Following in his footsteps, later Greek physicians blamed female illness on "wandering womb[s].” The author suggests that Hippocrates’ ideas aligned with the prevailing view that women existed solely for the purposes of childbearing/rearing. Hippocratic misogyny became entrenched in later European cultural and medical thinking, as suggested by how more "enlightened" doctors from the 18th century still blamed (White) women's physical and emotional pains on reproductive malfunctions. Enslaved women of color fared far worse: At best, they were the objects of cruel experiments because White patriarchy had deemed them unable to feel pain. By the mid-1800s, early suffragists like Harriet Taylor Mill, whom doctors diagnosed with "nervous disorders,” began to more openly question the patriarchal status quo. But the patriarchal establishment used the old argument of hysteria to discredit them and their political activities. As White women became more socially empowered in the 20th century, medicine became another tool of patriarchy to control them. In the 1920s and ’30s, the American medical establishment sanctioned forced sterilization of thousands of Black Southern women "in the name of social improvement.” A decade later in Britain, the British government controlled White female reproduction with welfare programs designed to "encourage women to produce and nurture citizens of the future.” Thoughtful and often disturbing, this exhaustively researched book shows why women—including minority women and Cleghorn herself, who has lupus—must fight to be heard in a system that not only ignores them, but often makes them sicker.

Powerful, provocative, necessary reading.