Eleanor Cleghorn: “The Sick Woman” – the myth of uterine unemployment

80 percent of all people with autoimmune diseases are women. But before the diagnosis, there are often years of gloved walking, because doctors simply cannot believe that diffuse pain in women has tangible physical causes.

In her powerful new book Sick Woman, British cultural historian Eleanor Cleghorn says her autoimmune disease has also been ignored for years. In it, she takes her readers on a powerful tour through three thousand years of medical history, ignoring, dressing, and controlling the female body under the guise of the art of healing.

The first part deals with the period from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The author carefully and always legibly reconstructs the idea of ​​how the idea of ​​a “strangling uterus” has dominated medicine for centuries. It is claimed that when a woman was not constantly pregnant, her idling uterus would wander, damaging organs and triggering a variety of symptoms from cramps to shortness of breath to delusions.

“When man entered the Middle Ages, the womb moved with him,” writes Eleanor Cleghorn, eerily recalling what that meant for women at a time when Christian moral laws forbade any physical examination of the female body. Because women’s subjective statements were considered untrustworthy, the Medici relied on their fertile imaginations, stimulated by prejudice, disgust, and fear of female sexuality, for diagnosis and treatment.

Anyone who now hopes that the scientific nature of the healing profession has put an end to medical ignorance towards women should receive a bad lesson in the second and third parts of the book.

Using the contemporary history of the case, which also always reveals how women tried to resist, Eleanor Cleghorn shows what medicine has come up with in terms of ideology-driven treatments from the nineteenth century to the present day—from lobotomy for unruly wives to the rampant systemic surgery of the 1970s—years On the many happy pills that are supposed to keep women from questioning whether their chronic depression has anything to do with their stressful life state.

After much meticulous searching for clues, it is even more poignant when she tells Eleanor Cleghorn about her journey in the last trimester, about chronic pain, extremely complicated pregnancies, and babies born sick because doctors diagnosed them with an autoimmune disease. lupus erythematosus Unrecognized, it is a chronic disease that should and can be treated with medication. Her own experience has given this writer the strength to confront such a brutal history of medicine in more than 500 pages.

Eleanor Cleghorn concludes her book with a plea: “Believe us! We are the most reliable witnesses to what happens in our bodies.”