‘It’s infuriating and shocking’: how medicine has failed women over time

In the eye-opening new book Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn uses her own misdiagnosis at the hands of male doctors as a jumping point for an alarming history lesson

Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, believed that women were controlled by their uteruses. The father of modern gynecology, James Marion Sims, in the mid 1800s experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia, convinced that they felt less pain than white women. (Until its removal in 2018, his statue stood in New York City's Central Park for over a century.) Doctors claimed that women's suffrage would cause injury to women's fragile bodies and diminished minds. Such examples cast an abhorrent pall over first, do no harm."

Related: Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn review - battle for the female body