Unwell Women

Cleghorn's history works because it refuses to treat medical misogyny as a solved problem confined to the era of hysteria diagnoses and Victorian doctors. She moves from ancient humoral theory through the twentieth century's own forms of dismissal, and reviewers singled out how the book's final section—covering the modern era, including her own struggle to get a lupus diagnosis taken seriously—lands hardest precisely because it's the least distant from readers' own experience. Some critics found the earlier historical chapters more assured than the contemporary material. But the throughline holds: women's pain has been consistently reinterpreted by men as exaggeration, and the book documents that pattern relentlessly.