![]() The book is a pathbreaking dissection of the hand that Western medicine has dealt women since the first womb wandered in the fourth century BCE. Shippen evaded the noose by weaponising this vague and complex diagnosis within the broader framework of women’s place in the world, a mammoth history expertly chronicled by Dr Elinor Cleghorn in Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine & Myth in a Man-Made World. Part of the success of her deceit lay in historical understandings of hysteria, whose symptoms ran the gamut from hallucinations to fits to blindness, and which has arguably become one of the foremost cultural reference points for medical misogyny today – even going viral on Twitter from time to time. ![]() Shippen, of course, later professed herself the mastermind behind it all a master spy in her own right, her hysterics were no more than a clever ruse. “She for a considerable time intirely lost her senses fell into a convulsion … We have every reason to believe she was intirely unacquainted with the plan.” “It was the most affecting scene I ever was witness to,” none other than Alexander Hamilton later wrote. ![]() Military officer’s wife and socialite Peggy Shippen learns that her husband has betrayed the Revolutionary cause. Georgia Poplett talks to author Elinor Cleghorn about her book Unwell Women, and explores the history, beliefs, and language surrounding the all-pervasive culture of medical misogyny in the West.ĬW: This feature discusses sexual and medical violence. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |