* Kate Williams, author of Rival Queens * Cleghorn unmasks with devastating clarity how so much of 'women's health' has been tied into efforts to control women, inculcate what was proper feminine behaviour and slot them into patriarchal culture as happy reproductive units. Packed with character studies of women who have suffered, challenged and rewritten medical orthodoxy - and drawing on her own experience of un-diagnosed Lupus disease - this is a ground-breaking and timely expose of the medical world and woman's place within it.Ī searing, brilliant investigation, an intricate and urgent book on how women's health has constantly been misunderstood and miscast throughout history, how men invented theories that plunged women into misery, pain and even death - from Anne Greene hanged for a miscarriage to the 1940s housewives lobotomised or subject to other operations to treat their depression, from drugs intended to 'control' women's health that were rushed to market to women experimented upon in the name of science, the cruel differential treatment of women of colour. In Unwell Women Elinor Cleghorn unpacks the roots of the perpetual misunderstanding, mystification and misdiagnosis of women's bodies, and traces the journey from the 'wandering womb' of ancient Greece, the rise of witch trials in Medieval Europe, through the dawn of Hysteria, to modern day understandings of autoimmune diseases, the menopause and conditions like endometriosis. And medical progress has always reflected the realities of a changing world, and the meanings of being human.' The history of medicine, of illness, is a history of people, of their bodies and their lives, not just physicians, surgeons, clinicians and researchers. But medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. We want our doctors to listen to us and care for us as people, but we also need their assessments of our pain and fevers, aches and exhaustion to be free of any prejudice about who we are, our gender, or the colour of our skin. And as a science, we expect medicine to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality. 'We are taught that medicine is the art of solving our body's mysteries. 'UNWELL WOMEN is a powerful and fascinating book t hat takes an unsparing look at how women's bodies have been misunderstood and misdiagnosed for centuries. 'One of the most important books of our generation' Fern Riddell 'A searing, brilliant investigation, an intricate and urgent book on how women's health has constantly been misunderstood and miscast throughout history' Kate Williams
'A passionate and indignant history' The Times Unwell Women is not just a compelling investigation, but an essential one' Observer
'A richly detailed, wide-ranging and enraging history.
'Seamlessly melding scholarship with passion, Unwell Women is the definition of unputdownable' Telegraph
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