All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today by Elizabeth Comen M.D.
All in Her Head
Subtitle: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today
Author: Elizabeth Comen, M.D.
Genre: Nonfiction, Health, Science
Format: Physical Purchase
Publish Date: February 2024
Read: July 2024
Favorite Quote: When fear stops us from asking questions, it stops us from solving treatable problems.
Synopsis: History is rife with medical experiments and growth in our knowledge. However, women have consistently been left out of medical history and objectified, dismissed, and erased. Dr. Comen dives into the history of women as patients and shares how much farther we have to go despite the advancements we’ve made in the last 50 years. Dr. Comen advocates for representation, transparency, and visibility, as well as more studies with women’s health in mind to bridge the gap in medical knowledge further.
Why does this book beguile? For a book written by a doctor, I was delighted by the approachability of All in Her Head. Dr. Comen, an oncologist, describes the various systems we have in our bodies (skin, blood, respiratory, reproductive) and helps to normalize women’s experiences. Too much of the medical data we have is based on a “typical” male body. Women’s needs are different. As an example, Comen discusses how the COVID vaccine affected many women’s menstration and how those experience were summarily dismissed because doctors “lacked data.” In reality, the vaccine was not tested on enough women throughout different points of the cycle to build a data set.
All in Her Head is a fascinating look at how women were blamed for problems simply due to a lack of curiosity - or because of fear. I do wish the author had gotten a bit deeper into some of the data and histories, but a great book nonetheless.
Rating: 4/5
If you’re interested in this, read*: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez