The book challenges medicine’s long-held delusion of a gender binary in which the (white) male body is taken as standard, and the ‘female’ body-defined by the presence of a dangerous and unruly womb-is viewed as essentially pathological, and the consequences of this for all women, trans men, and non-binary people. Shocking-and true-stories like these pervade medical historian Elinor Cleghorn’s non-fiction debut, “ Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World,” which reveals the history of gendered medicine in a way that is at once scientifically evidenced, personal, and intersectional. It would take a man’s pleasure to fix this unwell woman. His prescription? Marriage and penetrative sex to release the blockage. His diagnosis was that as the girl had gone through puberty but was not yet married her body must be overfilled with menstrual blood, such that it had oozed into her veins and turned her mad. The famous physician, Hippocrates of Cos, (of Hippocratic Oath fame) was called to help. In fact, her symptoms were so severe that she considered taking her own life, just to escape them. Thousands of years ago, a teenage girl walked the streets at night, suffering from pain, high fever, and disturbing hallucinations.
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