Even so, I’ve always felt that I could articulate what was wrong with my body fairly clearly, at least in my own words, if not in a medical sense, and I’ve been fortunate to see a number of compassionate family doctors and gynecologists and physical therapists ( all women themselves). Cleghorn’s suggestion that “the answers lie in our bodies and in the stories our bodies have always written” seems to be true to me.
But talking to other women who have had similar problems, I’ve found that it’s not that easy for everyone. Friends and other women often have difficulty talking about what is wrong with their body. They know that their malaise is not normative and that the medical words may not yet exist to express their experience in a socially acceptable way.
Cleghorn’s Unwell Women writes such difficult physical experiences clearly and concisely into the unquestioned existence. A historian of science and culture, she delves into the subject, and her book articulates the pain of unexplained women’s health with refreshing clarity and traces that pain is written into a patriarchal narrative. The path that she takes through the history of medicine is consistent and convincing and traces the oppression of women’s bodies and experiences from Roman times to the present.
She moves through a variety of issues that have affected women’s bodies, from the balancing of the four juices, witchcraft, hysteria, and sterilization during the Holocaust to current “mysterious” conditions lacking in detailed medical research, such as endometriosis and vaginismus. Reports of the forced sterilization of Jews and Roma women by the “gynecologist” Carl Clauberg during the Holocaust are particularly shocking. Cleghorn’s own account of her lupus experience is also instructive. As I read this book, even as a woman with similar experiences, I found many of the stories shocking.
Cleghorn provides a clear explanation of the way female experiences have been marginalized, and she also takes care to include the lives of a wide variety of women, rather than just focusing on a Western-style health narrative. The book is valid to read because there are conditions that we can often hardly describe, a language and a history of physical oppression clearly explained. But it’s also very informative for those who (unsurprisingly given the lack of education on the subject) don’t know how to approach women’s health. References to feminist authors and activists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman are not blunt, but rather show the structure in a helpful way. Cleghorn’s book is in some ways comparable to Netflix Sex Education in terms of its educational focus, but with the cultural and medical context that the show lacks.
Cleghorn argues that talking about our bodies will help correct the imbalance in medical culture. To do that “is deeply feminist. It is generous and courageous to reconsider the trauma of pain and to remember it. ”She therefore advocates counteracting the silence with a new language of the body, turning from the inside out and allowing our physicality to rather than letting the existing medical narrative shape how we and others understand our health: “the truth about our illnesses”. and diseases are in our own bodies. Medicine has to let us translate the languages it is trying to speak. “
But with the argument “Feminism has given us our bodies back”, Cleghorn assumes that women actually have full access to the language of their own form. This is where Unwell Women falters. “The lives of sick women depend on medicine learning to listen,” writes Cleghorn, but it presupposes that women have access to a language that is appropriate to the expression of their experiences. It is banal to insist that women have reclaimed the word and their own bodies to such an extent that we can simply express our suffering and be heard. Articulation is still very difficult unless there is always a framework to conceptualize pain, and women, especially those experiencing further identity-based discrimination in medicine, may not always be able to use their bodies and voices in such a way Bringing to speak as they do when faced with a doctor who appears unable or unwilling.
Still, Cleghorn is undoubtedly right that “the cultural geography of chronic diseases of women is shifting,” and her own clear portrayal contributes significantly to that shift. She is not wrong when she writes that “we are the most reliable narrators of what happens in our own bodies”. Is it still possible to be absolutely reliable in a language that is not quite your own? Women can have difficulty telling what is happening to their bodies without a systematic structure through which to receive and share that knowledge. Sometimes just speaking isn’t as easy as it seems. But we have to hope that the change that Cleghorn sees continues and towards which her own book is steadily heading.
@bunt_lydia
source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/unwell-women-review-misunderstanding-and-misdiagnosis/
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