![]() Her understanding of ancient and medieval history simply isn't strong, either in the general terms or in the specifics of medical history. is in "humanities and cultural studies", and her dissertation appears to have been on twentieth-century dance and film studies), and it shows. On the other hand, Cleghorn isn't actually a trained historian of medicine (her Ph.D. Some of the events Cleghorn recounts are really horrific, like the early testing of the contraceptive pill on poor and mostly illiterate Puerto Rican women who were unable to give informed consent and who suffered horrific side effects. (Cleghorn looks at western Europe fairly broadly in the early part of the book, but the closer she gets to the present day the more she focuses on Anglophone bio-medicine in the UK and US.) I appreciated her awareness of how race and class affect how women are treated: wealthy white women might be patronised or infantilised about their illnesses, but Black women's pain is often dismissed by physicians as non-existent. On the one hand, Elinor Cleghorn writes with convincing passion about how the long-standing patriarchal biases of the medical profession have resulted in the misunderstanding of women's illnesses and suffering, and have often compounded them. ![]()
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