All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

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. Agent: Yfat Reiss Gendell, YRG Partners. (Feb.)