All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Womens Bodies and Why It Matters Today - A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

ISBN: 0063293013

Author: Comen, Elizabeth

Condition: Used

Finalist for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing AwardUSA Today BestsellerAll in Her Head accomplishes a remarkable feat of storytelling. By combining essential medical histories about womens bodies with all the narrative propulsion of a medical thriller, Comen has written a must-read, compelling, and important book.-Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Song of the CellWow! This book will upend everything you thought you knew about your body while empowering you to make better decisions moving forward. Through storytelling, extensive research, and easy recommendations, Dr. Elizabeth Comen has given us all a priceless road map to reclaim our agency.-Eve Rodsky, author of Fair PlayA surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining work of narrative nonfiction, this medical history is both a collective narrative of womens bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around womens health.For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of womens healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless-a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by womens own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences. The result is a cultural and societal legacy of gender bias in medicine that continues to shape the (mis)treatment and care of women.While the modern age has seen significant advancements in the medical field, the notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on-as do the pervasive societal stigmas and lingering ignorance that shape womens health and relationships with their own bodies.In a feat of compelling science writing, Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Dr. Elizabeth Comen draws back the curtain on the collective medical history of women to reintroduce us to our whole bodies-how they work, the actual doctors and patients whose perspectives and experiences laid the foundation for todays medical thought, and the many oversights that still remain unaddressed. With a physicians knowledge and empathy, Dr. Comen follows the road map of the eleven organ systems to share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own experience treating thousands of women.Empowering women to better understand ourselves and encouraging patient advocacy for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives- for us and generations to come-All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of womens medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of womens history and bodies.