librijess's review against another edition

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emotional informative

5.0


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extraaardvark's review against another edition

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challenging dark inspiring reflective slow-paced

4.75


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solliereads's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

What an absolutely vital and incredible read! This book has made me totally rethink my approach to medical misogyny and medical malpractice as a direct result of the disbelief of women and their experiences with pain. I've suffered with unexplained chronic pain for a long time, and I've always been turned away when I attempted to seek help, support and understanding of the pain and exhaustion that no professional has ever seemed to want to touch with a five-foot pole. Reading this book felt like a warm hug - true, the facts are harrowing, particularly those regarding the experiences of women of colour and their repeated erasures from feminist movements, as well as their especially harsh experiences with medical malpractice and being treated as experimental patients without their expressed knowledge or consent, but every single fact has been included in this book to scream out that all women, regardless of race and class, deserve and demand to be believed by the professional practitioners that hold their lives in their hands.

I really appreciated, too, having a clear timeline of events that provide much-needed context regarding various issues in women's health. It was by no means an easy read, and there were times where I was so disgusted by the things women have gone through that I wanted to put the book away, but it was certainly an immensely helpful one. Cleghorn has clearly gone to great lengths to write a text of such great importance on the subject of medical misogyny, and everything in her book is backed up by a massive amount of citations, none of which are pointlessly crammed in there either. I truly look forward to reading her upcoming book in 2024 - MOTHERS: An Intimate History - and I fully expect it to be just as crucial a read as this was.

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rosalind's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0


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sebrittainclark's review against another edition

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challenging informative slow-paced

4.0

This books starts with Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks and works its way through history to lay out the misinformation and bias against women in Western medicine has and continues to affect the way women are treated and diagnosed with disease. At lot of this history is brutal. Terrible things have been done particularly to BIPOC, disabled, and poor women throughout history, and this book does not shy away from that truth.

This book isn't an easy read, but it's an important one to understand the biases that exist in medicine today, like how many women don't know the signs of a heart attack because popular media focuses on the signs that appear in men. Or the multi-year process it takes to get a diagnosis of a chronic, or autoimmune disease, both of which disproportionately affect women. 

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