Silenced and shamed

Unwell Women, by Elinor Cleghorn

I have been rather quiet this week, on Substack and in real life. I have spent much of my time reading, enthralled and enraged¹, Elinor Cleghorn’s extensive history of medical misogyny Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World. (Thank you to my friend, Kate, for giving this to me almost a year ago! My tendency to stall on books that I am desperate to read is a whole other post…)

Cleghorn’s book charts the long history of women’s struggles to have their own bodily experiences acknowledged both by medical practitioners and by society in general. She describes the continuing lack of understanding of the female body, starting with the Ancient Greeks and their ideas about a womb that became ‘“vexed and aggrieved” if its desires for childbearing were not met’,² through to the modern day, as ‘autoimmune diseases increase [women are disproportionally affected], and medicine still can’t explain why’³. In the book we meet a wide range of women, from Trota, a female docto…