Ugh, that hurts!
It hurts there and over here, the tops of your feet and the side of your knee, behind your eyes and between your shoulder blades. Your heart pounds, your hands shake, and your stomach’s rolling like a dice cup. You can’t complain, though. As in the new book, “All in Her Head” by Elizabeth Comen, M.D., who’d listen?
The small skeleton, no bigger than that of a five-year-old, dangles by a wire in a museum in Philadelphia, the skull of an infant in its bony hand. The skeleton was once a living person, a dwarf who lived in New Orleans; the skull is that of her infant who died at birth, along with its mother. The large skeleton of the man standing next to them has had a name all along. Only recently did anyone bother to learn the name of the woman.
It was this way for centuries in the U.S.: when medical care was needed, women were ignored, denied, minimized, scoffed at, and physically injured. Most of the perpetrators were men who willfully ignored their own observations, Comen says. They refused to heed what they saw or callously didn’t care, in favor of personal gain.
Take, for instance, plastic surgery. Its origins were on the battlefields of the Civil War, to help soldiers disfigured by bullets and cannon balls. Not long after the war, early medical specialists turned their eyes toward women, breast enhancement, and rhinoplasty.
Says Comen, “beauty… was in the eye of the beholder — but now, the beholder was holding a scalpel.”
In the past, doctors weighed in about fashion, personal morality, what women ate, how they looked, and what they did for fun. The believed that exercise was bad, and they forced women (but never men) to prove their gender in competition. They treated women like men in cardiac issues; promoted cigarettes to women for weight loss; and one doctor, under the belief that they didn’t require it, did intimate surgery on enslaved women without anesthesia…
Imagine for a minute that you were able to brush away all the cringe-worthiness that’s inside this book. Imagine that you looked past the purposeful cruelty and the laissez faire attitude towards women’s health. If you could do all that – big “if” — then “All in Her Head” would still outrage you.
You can attribute that to the way author Elizabeth Comen, M.D. makes this book completely relatable. She begins with a story that puts a reader in the shoes of several women who were victimized by the times in which they lived and the patriarchal medical establishments that often willingly failed them. Comen does it with sympathy and indignation mixed with a little shock; she adds personal observations, too, which soften the insults enough to keep you reading.
Science lovers and readers of true medical tales will enjoy this book, and don’t be surprised if it makes you keep a sharper eagle-eye on your medical care. “All in Her Head” won’t cure what ails you, but it can’t hurt.
“All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early medicine Taught Us about Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today” by Elizabeth Comen, M.D.
c.2024, Harper Wave
$32.00
368 pages
