A review by menniemenace
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn
3.0
3.5/5
This is a heavy book. It covers the mistreatment and bias against women in medicine, which are very anger-inducing topics to read about.
I like that the book was written because the author faced a similar situation to what women faced ages ago. Having a personal motive to write the book made it ring true.
It's awful that ignorant men were -and still are- able to diagnose very random diseases because they don't understand women's bodies or trust them. People actually believed that the womb wanders in the body every now and then. That was an actual unchallenged medical diagnosis.
This book tells stories where the medicine was just pure violence against women and even straight-up torture at times. It's very infuriating to read about it, and even more infuriating that it's still happening.
In Egypt, there are a lot of cases where doctors refuse to operate on unmarried girls if they're poor or uneducated because some operations lead to complications in pregnancy. They just decide for the girls and refuse them the medical treatment they're entitled to. Some doctors just don't believe women when they report their symptoms, and others refuse outright to give them contraceptive medications or tie their tubes if they request it. This is happening in 2021 so reading this book made me feel like we barely made any progress on that front.
My only problem with the book is that sometimes I lost the common thread between all the chapters and incidents. They were all significant, but in some cases there was a very convoluted link between the story and the main topic.
This is a heavy book. It covers the mistreatment and bias against women in medicine, which are very anger-inducing topics to read about.
I like that the book was written because the author faced a similar situation to what women faced ages ago. Having a personal motive to write the book made it ring true.
It's awful that ignorant men were -and still are- able to diagnose very random diseases because they don't understand women's bodies or trust them. People actually believed that the womb wanders in the body every now and then. That was an actual unchallenged medical diagnosis.
This book tells stories where the medicine was just pure violence against women and even straight-up torture at times. It's very infuriating to read about it, and even more infuriating that it's still happening.
In Egypt, there are a lot of cases where doctors refuse to operate on unmarried girls if they're poor or uneducated because some operations lead to complications in pregnancy. They just decide for the girls and refuse them the medical treatment they're entitled to. Some doctors just don't believe women when they report their symptoms, and others refuse outright to give them contraceptive medications or tie their tubes if they request it. This is happening in 2021 so reading this book made me feel like we barely made any progress on that front.
My only problem with the book is that sometimes I lost the common thread between all the chapters and incidents. They were all significant, but in some cases there was a very convoluted link between the story and the main topic.