Unwell Women (2021)

A history of medicine told from the side of the patients it misread. Cleghorn follows the idea of the "wandering womb" from ancient Greece through to modern thinking on hormones, menstruation and menopause, showing how women's complaints were again and again tied to their reproductive systems. It began with her own seven years of dismissed symptoms before a lupus diagnosis, and that urgency carries the book without turning it into a memoir. She is clear that enslaved women fared worse still. It pairs well with the broad surveys, which give this story far less room.