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All in her head : the truth and lies early medicine taught us about women's bodies and why it matters today / Elizabeth Comen.

by Comen, Elizabeth.

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HarperWave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2024.

362.108209 C732a

Women's health services -- History.

Women -- Health and hygiene -- History.

Women -- Health and hygiene -- Sociological aspects.

Sexism in medicine.

9780063293014 (hc.)

xix, 347 p. ; 24 cm.

Includes index.

Elizabeth Comen, MD, has dedicated her medical career to saving the lives of women. An award-winning, internationally sought-after clinician and physician-scientist, Dr. Comen works as a medical oncologist with a specialty in breast cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and is an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. She earned her BA in the history of science from Harvard College and her MD from Harvard Medical School, then completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and her fellowship in oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She lives in New York City with her family.

"In the spirit of Sid Mukherjee's 'Emperor of All Maladies,' a medical history that is both a collective narrative of women's bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around personal health, self-improvement, and the future of healthcare for everyone."--From publisher.

"Oncologist Comen serves up a startling survey of how male medical professionals have dismissed, pathologized, and misunderstood women’s bodies throughout history. Comen notes that 16th-century doctors prescribed penetrative sex as a treatment for the bogus diagnosis of chlorosis, which was thought to afflict young women suffering from 'weakness and pallor,' and that the erroneous 19th-century belief that women don't get heart disease continues to reverberate in the underrepresentation, and sometimes outright omission, of women from studies on the condition. Highlighting how health guidance for women has often been based more in patriarchal values than objective science, Comen explains that Victorian dietary advice discouraged women from 'eating meat, or eating too much,' because male doctors believed women were 'congenitally less capable' of controlling their appetite. Moral panics about wearing corsets, masturbating, and bicycling followed the same pattern, Comen contends, arguing that complaints about the latter, ostensibly stemming from fear that cycling would damage genitalia, were actually about men's anxieties over the independence afforded women by the new mode of travel. Meticulously researched and conveyed in lucid prose, this fascinates and outrages in equal measure."--Publishers Weekly.

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