Elinor Cleghorn Books
Elinor Cleghorn is a British historian specializing in culture and medicine. Her interest in women’s health history arose from her own experience with an autoimmune disease.
Known for: Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
Books by Elinor Cleghorn
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World is a groundbreaking history of women’s health that explores how medicine has understood and treated women’s bodies from ancient times to the present. Elinor Cleghorn examines the myths, biases, and misdiagnoses that have shaped women’s experiences of illness, revealing how medical science has long been influenced by male-centered perspectives on the body and disease.
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Ancient and Classical Medicine
Medicine’s origins already carried the seeds of misconception. In the world of Hippocrates and Galen, the female body was defined by lack, by deviation from the male norm. Ancient Greek physicians described women as moist, unstable, and ruled by their womb—an organ believed to wander inside the body...
From Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
Medieval and Renaissance Beliefs
Following the collapse of classical empires, the care of the body merged with theology. Women’s illnesses became moral symbols—signs of temptation, punishment, or divine design. In the medieval imagination, purity was the path to health, sin the route to disease. A fever could be read as divine corr...
From Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
About Elinor Cleghorn
Elinor Cleghorn is a British historian specializing in culture and medicine. Her interest in women’s health history arose from her own experience with an autoimmune disease. She has worked in academic research and cultural outreach, and Unwell Women is her first book.
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Elinor Cleghorn is a British historian specializing in culture and medicine. Her interest in women’s health history arose from her own experience with an autoimmune disease.
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