The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: Unwell Women
Author: Elinor Cleghorn
Published: November 2021
Genre: Non-Fiction, Medicine
Themes: Medicine, Feminism

One sentence summary: A history of medical history through the lens of women, or, how women have been severely mistreated medically throughout history.

One sentence review: Utterly brilliant yet continuously miserable.

Review:

If you’re looking for a book to make you feel utterly miserable about women’s medical care throughout history, then Unwell Women is the book for you. And while that might sound like I’m giving you mixed messages, I promise this is absolutely a recommendation.

Women’s medicine in today’s world is bleak at best: late diagnoses, continued disbelief, a severe lack of representation in clinical trials and let’s not even mention the lack of funding and research happening on women centred issues. But perhaps not so surprisingly, it’s been this terrible and worse throughout history – think lobotomy’s at the slightest inconvenience that revert you back to a childlike state, medical experiments without sedation and worse.

It’s one of situations that’s so horrifying you can’t look away, but the writing is brilliant so of course you don’t want to. It was easy and accessible to follow, unlike some historical non-fictions I’ve read, and from a writing point of view, was a genuine pleasure to read.

I was really impressed with the inclusion of diversity in the book – class, race, sexualities, disability and other qualities are consistently mentioned throughout and not just a one pager at the end of the book (GCSE History of Medicine I’m looking at you). It’s a fair and broad analysis and you can really tell the author both deeply cared about that and was intentional about it from the beginning.

Listening on audio was such a delight and the moments of humour and sarcasm absolutely shone through. It’s narrated by Hanako Footman and I can’t recommend it enough.

Are you planning to pick this one up?

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And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 08/12/2025