We are taught that medicine is the art of solving our body's mysteries. And as a science we
expect medicine to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality. 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. But medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. The history
of medicine of illness is a history of people of their bodies and their lives not just
physicians surgeons clinicians and researchers. And medical progress has always reflected the
realities of a changing world and the meanings of being human.' 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. 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 exposé
of the medical world and woman's place within it.
